University of California Berkeley

Regional Oral History Office University of California

The Bancroft Library Berkeley, California

College of Engineering Oral History Series

University History Series

George J. Maslach

AERONAUTICAL ENGINEER, PROFESSOR, DEAN OF THE COLLEGE OF ENGINEERING,

PROVOST FOR PROFESSIONAL SCHOOLS AND COLLEGES, VICE CHANCELLOR FOR
RESEARCH AND ACADEMIC AFFAIRS, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY,
1949 TO 1983

With Introductions by
Christina Maslach
Karl Pister
and
Chang-Lin Tien

Interviews conducted by
Eleanor Swent
in 1998 and 1999

Copyright 2000 by The Regents of the University of California

Since 1954 the Regional Oral History Office has been interviewing leading
participants in or well-placed witnesses to major events in the development of
Northern California, the West, and the Nation. Oral history is a method of
collecting historical information through tape-recorded interviews between a
narrator with firsthand knowledge of historically significant events and a well-
informed interviewer, with the goal of preserving substantive additions to the
historical record. The tape recording is transcribed, lightly edited for
continuity and clarity, and reviewed by the interviewee. The corrected
manuscript is indexed, bound with photographs and illustrative materials, and
placed in The Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley, and in
other research collections for scholarly use. Because it is primary material,
oral history is not intended to present the final, verified, or complete
narrative of events. It is a spoken account, offered by the interviewee in
response to questioning, and as such it is reflective, partisan, deeply involved,
and irreplaceable.

************************************

All uses of this manuscript are covered by a legal agreement

between The Regents of the University of California and George J.
Maslach dated August 20, 1998. The manuscript is thereby made
available for research purposes. All literary rights in the
manuscript, including the right to publish, are reserved to The
Bancroft Library of the University of California, Berkeley. No part
of the manuscript may be quoted for publication without the written
permission of the Director of The Bancroft Library of the University
of California, Berkeley.

Requests for permission to quote for publication should be

addressed to the Regional Oral History Office, 486 Library,
University of California, Berkeley 94720, and should include
identification of the specific passages to be quoted, anticipated
use of the passages, and identification of the user. The legal
agreement with George J. Maslach requires that he be notified of the
request and allowed thirty days in which to respond.

It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows:

George J. Maslach, "Aeronautical Engineer,

Professor, Dean of the College of
Engineering, Provost for Professional
Schools and Colleges, Vice Chancellor for
Research and Academic Affairs, University
of California, Berkeley, 1949 to 1983," an
oral history conducted in 1998 and 1999 by
Eleanor Swent, Regional Oral History
Office, The Bancroft Library, University
of California, Berkeley, 2000.

Copy no.
George Maslach, circa 1965,
Cataloguing information:

George J. Maslach (b. 1920) Aeronautical engineer,

university administrator

Aeronautical Engineer, Professor, Dean of the College of Engineering,

Provost for Professional Schools and Colleges, Vice Chancellor for Research
and Academic Affairs, University of California, Berkeley, 1949 to 1983,
2000, xiii 523 pp.

Growing up in San Francisco, 1920-1937; SF Junior College, UC Berkeley,

1937-1942; MIT Radiation Laboratory, design and development of radar, 1942-
1945; General Precision Laboratories, research engineer, 1945-1949; UC
Berkeley: 1949-1963, research and teaching, Director, Institute of
Engineering Research; 1963-1972, Dean of College of Engineering, Free
Speech Movement, Third World Liberation Movement, articulation of community
colleges and universities; 1972-1981, Provost for Professional Schools and
Colleges; 1981-1983, Vice Chancellor for Research and Academic Affairs;
discusses advising U.S. Dept of Commerce, U.S. Navy, research grants,
.

development of computer science, electronics.

Introductions by Christina Maslach, professor of psychology; Karl

Pister, professor emeritus of engineering; Chang-Lin Tien, chancellor
emeritus, UC Berkeley.

Interviews conducted by Eleanor Swent in 1998 and 1999 for the

Regional Oral History Office College of Engineering Oral History
Series, the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The Bancroft Library, on behalf of future

researchers,
wishes to thank the following persons and
organizations
whose contributions have made possible this oral
history with
George J. Maslach

Doris C. Maslach
Sam Ruvkun
University of California, Berkeley, Engineering Alumni Society
Berkeley Engineering Fund
TABLE OF CONTENTS- -George J. Maslach

PREFACE

INTRODUCTION by Christina Maslach i

INTRODUCTION by Karl S. Pister v

INTRODUCTION by Chang-Lin Tien vii

INTERVIEW HISTORY by Eleanor Swent ix

BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION Xll

FAMILY AND EARLY YEARS TO 1937 !

Family in Poland
Immigrating to America, 1904 4
Potrero Hill, San Francisco s Polish Neighborhood 7
Childhood in the Mission District 10
Father s Job at Leighton Industries 12
McAllister Street and the Benedettis 17
Father s Political Interests 20
Larkin Street Apartment House, 1929
Home Education Helping Father 22
A Philosophy about the Value of Time 25
Religious Activity and Leaving the Catholic Church 26
The Central Library 29
Boy Scouts: Achieving Eagle Rank Very Young 30
Frances Eberhart 42
Clothes for Work and School 44
The Library and Reading 45
The Great Depression 47
The Blackhawk and Jazz 48
The Sea Scouts 50
Bill and Helen Andrews 51
Memories of Clipper Ships 56
Michel Lafaurie and Fishing Adventures 58
Memories of Hunter s Point and China Basin 60
Vic Sharp and Al Christopherson, Scout Leaders 62
Rebuilding Camp Roy-a-Neh 63
Working at the Crescent M Camp in the High Sierra 66
Working at Yosemite Park, 1937, 1938 70
Working as a Printer s Devil 75
Galileo High School 77
Opportunities During the Great Depression 89
Galileo, a High School for Science 90
The 1939 World s Fair and Beginning of Maturity 94
II SAN FRANCISCO JUNIOR COLLEGE AND THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA,
1937-1942 98
San Francisco Junior College, 1937 98
Father s Help for Polish Refugees 108
Taking the Cuneo Family to Yosemite 109
The University of California, 1940, a Different Level of
Education HO
A Combined Mechanics Course with Professor DeGarmo 113
A Successful Stint as a Tutor 114
Laboratory Assistant to Professor Richard Folsom 117
Three Influential Women: Nauta, Lane, and Woertendyke 118
Professors Larry Marshall and L. M. K. Boelter 121

III MIT RADIATION LABORATORY, 1942-1945 126

Getting Oriented as Number 504 126
"The Biggest Block Party You Ever Saw" in Hamtramck 129
Sailing the Transpac Race, 1939 133
Earlier Work as a Laborer for Barrett and Hilp in San Francisco 133
The Excitement of the Rad Lab 139
James Lawson and Jerrold Zacharias 143
Luis Alvarez Requests an Antenna Design 144
Two Months of Crammed Education in Radar 146
Three Months to Provide Radar 582 for the Panama Canal 148
Marblehead and Yachting with Charles Francis Adams 150
Elizabeth Blaney 154
Fran Hagerty, Builder of Radomes 157
Designing the Base for Radar Antennas--a Free-Wheeling
Operation 158
Contributing to the Design of Glide Control Approach Radar 160
Designing a Plan Position Indicator Console for Use on Ships 160
The Importance of Handgrips in the Design 161
Jerome Wiesner and Designing for Airborne Early Warning Radar 162
Education Seminars 163
I.I. Raab 165
Help from Vannevar Bush 167
Marriage to Doris Cuneo, March 1943 170
Blaney Family Hospitality for the Reception and Honeymoon 171
Sightseeing by Bicycle around Boston 175
The Manhattan Project and Declassifying the Rad Lab, August
1945 178

IV BUILDING UP A LABORATORY FOR GENERAL PRECISION LABORATORIES 182

Converting the Manville Estate into a Laboratory 182
A Startup Problem, Similar to that at MIT 184
Working on the Pioneer Fast Film Developing Unit 184
Return to San Francisco, 1949 187

V RESEARCH ENGINEER AT UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY, 1949 189

A Remarkable Change from New York 189
The First Research Contract, Experimenting on a Pitot Tube 190
Signatory on the First Basic Federal Research Contract 191
Heading Up the Contract with the Office of Naval Research 192
 Sam Schaff, Key Theoretician 193
Roxanne Anderson, Secretary and Olympic Champion 193
Lecturer for Undergraduate Classes, 1952-1954 195
Having the Class Design the Tests 196
Fun Teaching Mechanical Engineering Design 106 198
Al Hale, a Very Good Teacher 200
Associate Professor, 1954 201
Associate Director of the Institute of Engineering Research 201
Governor Edmund Brown Changed the Charging of Overhead
"Pat" 202
The University of California Requires Research, Public Service,
and Teaching 203
Henry H. Schade, Director of the Institute of
"Packy"

Engineering Research 203

Hans Albert Einstein, Carl Vogt and Practical Jokes
, 205
Leonard Farber s Mercedes-Benz and Another Vogt Trick 206
The Loyalty Oath, Not an Issue for George Maslach 207
Obtaining Signature Authority from Dean O Brien 208
A Bureaucratic Victory in Getting Contracts Approved 211
Learning How to Operate a Research Establishment 212
Sam Silver, a True Genius 213
Making an Illegal Transfer of Funds to Save the Electronics
Research Program 215

VI FULL PROFESSOR OF ENGINEERING, 1958-1963 218

Changing from a Research Engineer to an Academician 218
The Story Behind the Double Promotion 219
Solving a Gearing Problem at Mt Hamilton Observatory
. 221
Daughter Christina s Parallel Career 223
Research on Drag on Cylinders 224
Service on the Research Committee of the Academic Senate 225
Alan Renoir and Rhesus Monkeys 226
The Faculty Club and Networking 227
Enjoying Serving on Faculty Senate Committees 227
A Prize-Winning Presentation to the American Institute of
Chemical Engineers 229
Sputnik and Upper Atmosphere Dynamics Research 230
Sabbatical Leave in Europe Sponsored by NATO-AGARD 232
Lecturing in Aachen to the Top People in Aerodynamics 234
Thirty Lectures in Six Months 237
An Exciting Holiday for the Family 237
A Quantum Leap into International Research 240
Standard Berkeley Academic Family, Very Involved"
"A 240

VII THE COLLEGE OF ENGINEERING CHANGES ACADEMICALLY 243

Dean O Brien Sees the Need for Five Years and Research 243
O Brien Retires from the Deanship and the University 244
Dean John Whinnery and Chairing the Dean s Coordinating
Advisory Council 248
Mechanical Engineering Department Chair Sam Schaff 250
Chancellor Strong Offers the Deanship and a Triple Mandate 255
Changing to a Quarter System: Problem with a Silver Lining 258
Making the Major Decision 259
 A Month Spent Reading Faculty Files 260
Learning How a College Operates 264
Writing a Manual for Case Preparation 266
The Re-ireat at Granlibakken, December 1963 267

VIII DEAN OF THE COLLEGE OF ENGINEERING, 1963-1972 270

1963, a Critical Year in Rarefied Gas Dynamics 270
Frances Woertendyke Eberhart and Administrative Changes 271
Rachael Stageberg, Administrative Assistant 273
David Brown, Direector of Budget and Space Planning 274
Learning from Working with Chancellor Ed Strong 274
The Hearts Table at the Faculty Club 276
Recruitment and Advancement of Faculty 277
"Finding" Twenty-Three New Faculty Positions 279
Recruiting Engineering Students at the Community Colleges 280
An Important Report on Articulation of Community Colleges 285
Co-Dean with Roy Bainer of the College of Engineering at Davis 287
Changes in Curriculum to Accommodate Transfer Students 289
Computer Science, a New Engineering Activity, Contested by L&S 293
Reorganization of Other Engineering Curricula 294
Serving on the MIT Review Committee 295
Technical Advisor for the Department of Commerce 296
Twenty Years of Committee and Advisory Service to the Navy 297
A Jet-Set Professor, Going to Washington Many Weekends 299
The Chancellor s Coordinating Advisory Council 300
The Free Speech Movement 301
Mario Savio, Chemistry Student and FSM Leader 304
An Undercurrent of Factions in the University Administration 306
The Strong Influence of Engineers on the Campus 306
The Academic Senate Passes the "Time, Place, and Manner" Rules 307
A Challenging Conversation with President Clark Kerr 311
Achieving One Goal: Berkeley Engineering Ranked at the Top 313
Clark Kerr s Enormous Influence on Education 314
Maslach s Achievement in Building Faculty Appointments,
Advancements 315
Activities with Students and the Engineers Joint Council 316
The Engineering Alumni Society 318
Increasing the Subscriptions of California Engineer 319
Changing ASUC by Getting Voting Booths on the North Side of
Campus 320
Political Aspects 324
Making Changes in the Berkeley School Board 325
Political Contacts at the National Level 327
Dick Richard Folsom 327
Admiral Starr King 328
Herbert Holloman 328
Admiral William R. Smedberg 329
Paul Nitze 330
John Warner 330
McGeorge Bundy and Ford Foundation 331
S. I. Hayakawa 331
Bill Mailliard and Byron Rumford 333
 Work with the Ford Foundation 333
President and Mrs. Lyndon Johnson 335
Henry Jackson and EPA
"Scoop" 336
Lee DuBridge 335
Advisor on the Supersonic Transport; an Unworkable Airplane 337
Nomination as Director of the Environmental Protection Agency 339
The Chancellor s Shadow Cabinet 340
The Third World Movement; Activism Becomes Violent 350
Recruiting Minority Students 359
Look Magazine Features the Jet-Age Professor 362
Working out a Pact with The College of Letters and Science 364
More Engineers Receive the University Medal 366
Difficult Decanal Decisions Which Could Not Be Delegated 367
Changing the University Patent Policy to Reward the Inventor 371
Nobelists at Berkeley 373
The Faculty Club 374
Working to Elect a Prestigious Berkeley School Board 378
Doris Maslach a Member of the Berkeley Rent Board 380
National Political Activity: Meeting on the Plane to D.C. 381
Chairing the Shipping and Hovercraft Committee 382
Serving on the Manpower Commission 383
Vice President Hubert Humphrey Seeks A Scientist s Advice 384
A Meeting with Secretary of State Clark Clifford 387
Working to Bring About a Peace Settlement in Vietnam 388
Adlai Stevenson, Not Decisive on Major Issues 389
Bringing Nobelist Charles Townes to Berkeley 392
A Recollection of Robert Kennedy the Day Before He was Killed 392
"Dragging the Naval Academy into the Twentieth Century" 393
Roger Heyns, a Wonderful Chancellor 397
The Search Committee for a New Chancellor: De-Selection 398
Chancellor Albert Bowker s Fantastic Reservoir of Knowledge 401
The Triple Mandate as Dean of Engineering Was Accomplished 404

IX PROVOST FOR PROFESSIONAL SCHOOLS AND COLLEGES, 1972-1981 406

Superdean to Represent the Chancellor s Office 406
Roderic Park, Provost for Letters and Science 407
Furnishing the Office for Comfort and Friendliness 411
Forming the College of Natural Resources 413
Building a Staff 415
April Roy, Secretary and Administrative Assistant 416
The Academic Senate Does Away with the School of Criminology 420
More Recollections of Nobelists Seaborg and Segre 423
Living with Security Clearances 425
Charles and Frances Townes 426
The Faculty Club Hearts Table 427
A Disrupting Lawsuit is Brought Over Denial of Tenure 429
Implementing Affirmative Action in 1972-1973 430
A Major Civil Rights Report "Smothering Them with Numbers" 432
A Time-Consuming but Effective Process Achieved 27 Percent
Minority Hires 434
The Difficulty in Getting Women Chemistry Professors 435
Getting State Funding for University Buildings and Equipment 437
 Chancellor Bowker Changes Campus Funding by "Unleashing"
Colleges 440
Obtaining Funding for the Bechtel Student Center 443
The School of Social Welfare Gets Accreditation After All 445
The Work of the Budget Committee on Academic Personnel Matters 447
Improving Appointment Procedures in the Academic Personnel
Manual 448
Learning from Experience the Power of the Carbon Copy 449
Advising Chancellor Chang-Lin Tien on Streamlining Procedures 450
Planning for Succession in University Administration 452
A Peaceful Recapture of a Building Where Students Were
Protesting 455
Damage of the Worst Intellectual Type Done by the Protestors 457

X VICE CHANCELLOR FOR RESEARCH AND ACADEMIC AFFAIRS, 1981-1983 458

A Memo Regarding Research: Fine, but Ignored 458
Academic Services: Libraries and the Computer Center 459
Mike Heyman and Giving Up Smoking 460
A Major Overhaul of the Computer Center with Stuart Lynn 462
The Academic Personnel Office 464
Al Bowker, Creative Administrator 465
Activities in Retirement: Sailing, Travel, Consulting 467

XI EPILOGUE 473
On Problem-Solving 473
The Rise and Fall of Academic Disciplines Necessitate
Reorganization 474
The Importance of the Box
"Hold" 477
was a Great Ride"
"It 477

TAPE GUIDE 479

APPENDIX
Maslach family tree 481
College of Engineering, Degrees Earned, 1939-1990 483
Doctoral Degrees Awarded in the College of Engineering, 1943-44
to 1975-76 485
Herb Caen, San Francisco Chronicle, April 23, 1971 486
Photo and headline from "Campus Report," June- July 1972 487
"Jet-Age Professors," from Look magazine, February 23, 1965 488
United States Naval Academy Academic Advisory Board, 1974-75 493
Delegation from the College of Engineering of the University
of California, Berkeley, to the People s Republic of China,
1979 499
of the UC Berkeley Engineering Alumni
"History Society," from
Matrix, December 1978 501

UNIVERSITY HISTORY SERIES LIST 503

INDEX 515
PREFACE

When President Robert Gordon Sproul proposed that the Regents of the
University of California establish a Regional Oral History Office, he was
eager to have the office document both the University s history and its
impact on the state. The Regents established the office in 1954, "to

tape record the memoirs of persons who have contributed significantly to

the history of California and the West," thus embracing President
Sproul s vision and expanding its scope.

Administratively, the new program at Berkeley was placed within the

library, but the budget line was direct to the Office of the President.
An Academic Senate committee served as executive. In the four decades
that have followed, the program has grown in scope and personnel, and the
office has taken its place as a division of The Bancroft Library, the
University s manuscript and rare books library. The essential purpose of
the Regional Oral History Office, however, remains the same: to document
the movers and shakers of California and the West, and to give special
attention to those who have strong and continuing links to the University
of California.

The Regional Oral History Office at Berkeley is the oldest oral

history program within the University system, and the University History
Series is the Regional Oral History Office s longest established and most
diverse series of memoirs. This series documents the institutional
history of the University, through memoirs with leading professors and
administrators. At the same time, by tracing the contributions of
graduates, faculty members, officers, and staff to a broad array of
economic, social, and political institutions, it provides a record of the
impact of the University on the wider community of state and nation.

The oral history approach captures the flavor of incidents, events,

and personalities and provides details that formal records cannot reach.
For faculty, staff, and alumni, these memoirs serve as reminders of the
work of predecessors and foster a sense of responsibility toward those
who will join the University in years to come. Thus, they bind together
University participants from many eras and specialties, reminding them of
interests in common. For those who are interviewed, the memoirs present
a chance to express perceptions about the University, its role and
lasting influences, and to offer their own legacy of memories to the
University itself.

The University History Series over the years has enjoyed financial
support from a variety of sources. These include alumni groups and
individuals, campus departments, administrative units, and special groups
as well as grants and private gifts. For instance, the Women s Faculty
Club supported a series on the club and its members in order to preserve
insights into the role of women on campus. The Alumni Association
supported a number of interviews, including those with Ida Sproul, wife
of the President, and athletic coaches Clint Evans and Brutus Hamilton.
 ii

Their own academic units, often supplemented with contributions from

colleagues, have contributed for memoirs with Dean Ewald T. Grether,
Business Administration; Professor Garff Wilson, Public Ceremonies; Deans
Morrough P. O Brien and John Whinnery, Engineering; and Dean Milton
Stern, UC Extension. The Office of the Berkeley Chancellor has supported
oral history memoirs with Chancellors Edward W. Strong and Albert H.
Bowker .

To illustrate the University/community connection, many memoirs of

important University figures have in turn inspired, enriched, or grown
out of broader series documenting a variety of significant California
issues. For example, the Water Resources Center-sponsored interviews of
Professors Percy H. McGaughey, Sidney T. Harding, and Wilfred Langelier
have led to an ongoing series of oral histories on California water
issues. The California Wine Industry Series originated with an interview
of University enologist William V. Cruess and now has grown to a fifty-
nine-interview series of California s premier winemakers. California
Democratic Committeewoman Elinor Heller was interviewed in a series on
California Women Political Leaders, with support from the National
Endowment for the Humanities; her oral history was expanded to include an
extensive discussion of her years as a Regent of the University through
interviews funded by her family s gift to The Bancroft Library.

To further the documentation of the University s impact on state and

nation, Berkeley s Class of 1931, as their class gift on the occasion of
their fiftieth anniversary, endowed an oral history series titled "The
University of California, Source of Community Leaders." The series
reflects President Sproul s vision by recording the contributions of the
University s alumni, faculty members and administrators. The first oral
history focused on President Sproul himself. Interviews with thirty-four
key individuals dealt with his career from student years in the early
1900s through his term as the University s eleventh President, from 1930-
1958.

Gifts such as these allow the Regional Oral History Office to

continue to document the life of the University and its link with its
community. Through these oral history interviews, the University keeps
its own history alive, along with the flavor of irreplaceable personal
memories, experiences, and perceptions. A full list of completed memoirs
and those in process in the series is included following the index of
this volume.

September 1994 Harriet Nathan, Series Director

Regional Oral History Office University History Series
University of California
Berkeley, California Willa K. Baum, Division Head
Regional Oral History Office
 iii

INTRODUCTION by Christina Maslach

It is a special pleasure for me to write an introduction to the

oral history of my father s life and work here at Berkeley. Because of
him, the Maslach name has become one associated with a long tradition of
accomplishment and service to the Berkeley campus, and it is a family
legacy that I myself am trying to emulate.

The family roots of this tradition go back more than fifty years,
when both my father and mother were undergraduates at Cal That
.

experience was a special one for both of them, which forged a lifelong
bond to the campus. They spent a few years living elsewhere, but soon
returned to Berkeley when my father got a position in the College of
Engineering and they have been here ever since. Their life has been a
classic example of the university family--my father was involved in
research, teaching, and administration, while my mother was active in
both city and campus affairs, particularly in the overlap between town
and gown. And they raised a family of three childrenmyself and my two
younger brothers.

So Berkeley has always been my home. Growing up in a university

environment, as a sort of "academic brat," I had a special kind of
childhood that probably propelled me towards my own career in academia.
It was a childhood framed in various university events and university
people, and filled with tidbits of daily life on the campus. Most
memorable were the outcomes of the hearts games at the Faculty Club, as
well as teaching pedagogy (if the students weren t paying attention in
class, my father would, without missing a beat in his lecture, throw a
piece of chalk at their shoulder and his best shot was when two
students were talking to each other, and the chalk hit one and bounced
off the other) . Some of this talk about teaching must have rubbed off
on me because, unlike the doll play of my friends, my idea of fun was to
line my dolls up in rows and them.
"teach" At the end of the day, my
family would go to campus to pick up my father from some mysterious "T

Building," and my brothers and I would while away the time by rolling
down the hill of the Hearst Mining Circle (a hill that seemed very steep
at the time). On special occasions we would get to accompany him to the
Richmond Field Station. And later, when my assignments at Berkeley High
School required additional library resources, my father s stack pass
became invaluable to me.

But because Berkeley was literally my backyard, it never occurred

to me to go there as a college student so I did not follow in the
footsteps of my alumni parents. Rather, I left home to seek my academic
fortune f irst as an undergraduate at Harvard-Radclif fe College, and
then as a doctoral student at Stanford University. But with the wisdom
of hindsight, I note that I have indeed followed in the footsteps of
 iv

both my parents. I became a professor, just like my father, and I did

so at the University of California at Berkeley, just like my father.
But the content of his career, in terms of engineering and wind tunnels
and rarefied gas dynamics, was never my interest- -rather, it was the
psychology interests of my mother. So I seem to have borrowed from both
of them and to have then developed the unique blend that is mine as a
professor of psychology, back home again at Berkeley.

Ibegan my career here in 1971, as a brand-new Ph.D., so I am fast

approaching my thirtieth anniversary as a faculty member. My father and
I overlapped for about a decade, but we were in different parts of the
campus so our paths did not cross that often. We were also careful to
maintain separate spheres of campus life, to eliminate any suspicions of
nepotism or undue family influence. When I visited Berkeley for my job
interview, I was taken to the Faculty Club for lunch, and I remember
seeing my father striding into the room and then doing an about-face and
making a quick exit. As a young and naive assistant professor, I
accepted many invitations for community service or participation in
other events, not realizing until later that in some cases the interest
in me was actually an interest in getting an with my father.
"in"

The name of "Maslach" is relatively short and simple (as Polish

names go), but it tends to evoke: 1) mispronunciation, and 2) the query
"are you related to...?" In my early years on campus, the question was
always, "Hmm--are you related to George Maslach?", and when 1
acknowledged that I was, I was then known forever after as "Big George s
daughter." I knew I had reached an important milestone when the day
came that my father was asked if he was related to that professor in
Tolman Hall--and now he is just as well known as "Christina s father."
So there is a great sense of family pride in what "Maslach" has
contributed to the Berkeley traditionand I am delighted that there is
now an historical record of that first phase. I am especially pleased
that the publication of this important book is occurring in the spring
of 2000, so that we can celebrate this event as my father reaches his
eightieth year.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, DAD!

With much love and admiration from your daughter, Christina.

Christina Maslach
Professor of Psychology

March 2000
Berkeley, California
INTRODUCTION by Karl S. Pister

I first met George Maslach more than half a It is my

century ago.
recollection that he was a research engineer working on low pressure
aerodynamics at a facility located at the site of the old College Avenue
poollong abandoned as a swimming pool but used by the College of
j
Engineering as a research s .te. George moved from that position to an
associate professorship of Mechanical Engineering, beginning a long and
distinguished career as a faculty member and later as an academic
administrator at Berkeley. He shared with his predecessor, Mike
O Brien, a characteristic that would be seen as most unusual in the
academy todayneither had a doctoral degree. That notwithstanding,
these two deans of Engineering were instrumental in building a college
and shaping its direction in two critical periods of Berkeley s history.
While Dean O Brien faced the task of creating a post-World War II
academic unit at a time of enormous growth in student population, George
Maslach steered the college through the war at home the Free Speech
Movement and Cambodian Spring reactions to the war in Vietnam.

On two separate occasions during the nearly forty years while we

were both active at Berkeley, I was in the "academic chain of command"
(if that term can be imagined at a university), with George as my
senior. An anecdote from each of these periods serves to describe the
kind of academic intuition and vision that he gave so generously and
effectively to the campus. In neither instance, at the time, did I
share or appreciate his understanding or insight.

As noted in this oral history, the post-World War II College of

Engineering evolved from a single-department college with disciplinary-
based divisions of engineering into a multi-department college. Two of
the large departments, Civil and Mechanical Engineering, were then
comprised of distinct, intra-departmental divisions. This
organizational structure served the college well in building robust,
sub-disciplinary research and graduate programs at the expense of a
broader departmental identity. To his great credit George sensed the
need to return to a more integrated departmental structure by abolishing
the divisions. This he did in Mechanical Engineering but he was
unsuccessful in Civil Engineering--!, among others, was his chief
opponent. It was a decade later (when my role had changed from faculty
member to dean) that I realized that his decision had been the correct
one, given the evolution of the practice of engineering and the need for
more coherent undergraduate programs.

The second incident occurred when George was founding Provost of

Professional Schools and Colleges and I had just accepted Chancellor
Mike Heyrnan s invitation to be Dean of the College of Engineering. I
walked into George s office in California Hall to share my decision with
 vi

him. Without hesitation, he remarked, "Your challenge will be to secure

endowed chairs for the college." At the time I scarcely knew what an
endowed chair was, let alone how to go about securing one. Little did I
realize how right he was. It turned out that endowed chairs were just
the beginning, for I had to secure funds for a building as well. How
was this possible? Provost Maslach, looking to the future as was his
bent, had seeded the college with funds to hire a development officer at
the same time I became dean. Thanks to George it all fit together. The
quality of faculty and students was beyond question. The alumni were
extremely supportive and ready to help with fund raising. Who made this
possible? In his former role as dean, George had gained the FTEs [full-
time equivalents] and got the faculty appointed; he had personally
visited community colleges to urge the best students to transfer to
Berkeley, in conformance with the California Master Plan for Higher
Education; he was the dean who founded the Engineering Alumni Society,
whose membership formed the cadre for the Berkeley Engineering Fund,
which in turn was instrumental in assisting Tny development officer,
Marily Howekamp, and me, to secure twelve endowed chairs and the naming
gift for Soda Hall during my tenure.

The unseen hand of "Big George"--! am not aware that this term was
ever used to address him directly, but it was a common way of referring
to the dean among facultysteered the ship of the College of
Engineering and later the Berkeley campus through stormy seas, adding
great value to its cruise, to employ a metaphor that reflects yet
another side of his adventurous life.

you would seek his monuments, look around you" are words
"If

spoken at a different time of a different leader. Future generations of

faculty and students will benefit from the "monuments" created at
Berkeley by George Maslach. I count it a pleasure and privilege to have
worked with him.

Karl S. Pister
Vice President - Educational Outreach,
Office of the President
Chancellor Emeritus, UC Santa Cruz
Roy W. Carlson Professor of Engineering,
Emeritus, UC Berkeley

March, 2000
Oakland, California
 vii

INTRODUCTION by Chang-Lin Tien

It is with pride and respect that I offer this brief introduction

to the oral history of George R. Maslach. My association with George
began with my joining what was then called the Heat Power Systems
Division of the Mechanical Engineering Department in 1959 as a junior
faculty member. George was then chairman of the Aeronautical Sciences
Division, one of four divisions in Mechanical Engineering. From the
very beginning I was impressed with his acumen as a departmental leader.
In a time of much divisional faculty strife, he was always fair-minded
and reasonable and showed great skill in dealing with touchy intra-
departmental issues and personnel battles. In particular, he showed
great interest in mentoring junior faculty members and this interest had
a very positive influence in the formative years of my academic career.

The only faculty member without an advanced degree, George

nevertheless went on to rise to the top as Dean of Engineering, as
Provost of Professional Schools and Colleges, and as Vice Chancellor-
Research. His sound political judgment, broad perspective, and
strategic thinking were unusual among faculty, especially those in the
hard sciences, and these talents served him well throughout his
distinguished Cal career.

In time, the Heat Power Systems Division tired of receiving

misdirected phone calls complaining about heating problems on campus,
and renamed itself the Thermal Systems Division. As division chair
beginning in 1969, I worked in close association with Engineering Dean
Maslach until he moved on as provost. A legacy of his deanship of
personal significance to me was his successful push to eliminate the
divisional structure and to unify the faculty into a single Mechanical
Engineering Department. The rapid rise in reputation and stature of
Berkeley s Mechanical Engineering during the last twenty years is very
much a result of this organizational restructuring, although at the time
this restructuring met considerable faculty resistance, as in most cases
of academic reorganization.

For a time, when I was department chair and he was provost, our
interactions were infrequent. But we renewed our close association when
I was recruited in 1982 by Chancellor Mike Heyman to be faculty
assistant to Vice Chancellor Rod Park, and I began working closely with
George in his role as Vice Chancellor-Research. Again, he became my
mentor and later, my immediate predecessor in that position, and I have
always been grateful for the advice and guidance he provided me.

I must also state my great admiration for George s impressive

family. Doris has been an inspiration to many in the town and gown
arenas through her numerous activities and extensive involvement in
 viii

Berkeley community affairs, in particular as a member of the Berkeley

Rent Board. Their son, Steven Maslach, is an accomplished glass artist
in the Bay Area. I have also long appreciated daughter Christina
Maslach s brilliance and have admired her stellar professional
achievements. It was my pleasure to work with her when she served as
faculty assistant on the status of women during my tenure as chancellor.
In sum, it has been a great privilege to know and work with this
remarkable Berkeley academic family.

Chang-Lin Tien
University Professor
NEC Distinguished Professor of Engineering
Chancellor, 1990-1997

December 1999
Berkeley, California
 IX

INTERVIEW HISTORY--George Maslach

When I was asked to work with George Maslach on his oral history,
I was apprehensive and intimidated because his career was in
aeronautical engineering and university governance, whereas my expertise
was in mining engineering and mine management. Furthermore, this ora.".

history was to take its place in a series of fine oral histories already
completed with former Deans of the College of Engineering: Donald
McLaughlin, interviewed by Harriet Nathan; Morrough P. O Brien, by
Marilyn Ziebarth; and John Whinnery, by Ann Lage. In the end, of
course, I should have realized that George Maslach was a professor of
engineering before he was dean, provost, or vice chancellor, and so he
knew how to lay out a well-ordered account, make it intelligible to the
rankest beginner, and follow it step by step to its conclusion.

One of the unanticipated pleasures was the extent to which George

Maslach, a voracious reader and man of wide-ranging interests, was able
to place all of the major periods of his life in their large historical
and social context. He spent the first hours of the interviews evoking
the spirit of the San Francisco of his youth, when artesian wells
bubbled up among sand dunes in what is now Civic Center. Jazz at the
Blackhawk, sailing on San Francisco Bay, Boy Scouting, the public
library, the vitality of the Polish immigrant community and the
diversity of Galileo High School, are all recalled in wonderfully rich
detail as background to the story of his rise to the top of a great
university. Similarly, he recalls not only his significant technical
accomplishments at the M.I.T. Radiation Laboratory during World War II,
but the excitement and the fun of Cambridge, Boston, and Marblehead, and
as always, sailing.

His career at Berkeley falls rather neatly into decades, and again
he gives not only the details but the full flavor of each period; the
postwar campus which changed dramatically with arrival of more graduate
students and transfers from community colleges; the period of student
activism and revolt in which his diplomatic skills came into play; and
the greater national scene when UC had become a pre-eminent research
institution. This was when Look magazine featured him as a jet-age
professor, and he was spending most weekends in Washington advising the
U.S. Navy and other government bodies.

Eleven interviews were held, on 20 and 27 August, 29 September, 6

and 20 October 1998; and 19 January, 4 and 18 February, A and 18 March,
and 10 November 1990. All interviews were held in the morning.

The first interview session was conducted at the "hearts table" in

the Faculty Club lounge, his choice, because of the good memories of
card games played there through several decades. The room became
impossibly noisy, however, and so next we met in one of the smaller
dining rooms, which also proved impractical. Twice we interviewed in
room 406 in the Cory Engineering Building, twice in the conference room
of The Bancroft Library, and three times in the Strouse Room of the
Bancroft, where he identified a recording problem as a 60-cycle hum from
fluorescent lighting. We found optimum conditions for the tenth
interview in study room 6-B of the Doe Library. The brief epilogue was
recorded in an eleventh session in the Strouse Room.

In his introduction, Karl Pister reveals that George Maslach was

known as "Big George" behind his back, and he is indeed very tall, even
now when he is slightly stooped. He is thin, and agile except for
stiffness from recent knee surgery and some back trouble. (We compared
notes on lumbar A, the problem vertebra which we have in common.) He
has white hair, clear blue eyes, and dresses casually. I looked forward
to seeing which beautiful sweater he would wear to each interview.

He came to the early sessions with packets of photographs but he

seldom referred to any notes. He says that he has a photographic
memory; quite clearly he had a mental outline which he followed for each
interview. He spoke fluently and knew which topics he wanted to discuss
and in what order. Occasionally, but seldom, he fumbled for a name or a
date. I tried now and then to lead him into a byway, but generally I
was unsuccessful. Historians of science and technology, higher
education, and twentieth century America will all enjoy George Maslach s
comprehensive and articulate recollections.

The introductions to the oral history were written by daughter and

Professor Christina Maslach, former UC Santa Cruz Chancellor Karl
Pister, and former Chancellor Chang-Lin Tien of UC Berkeley. Background
interviews were held with colleagues Al Bowker, David Brown, Cline
Garland, Ernest Kuh, John Whinnery, and Robert Wiegel. I met with Doris
Maslach, who spoke movingly of the stressful years when her husband was
provost and hardly ever at home; when there was time available, he
needed to spend it working alone on his boat. She also spoke of the
special challenges faced by "faculty children" in a university town.

The tapes of the interviews were transcribed in the Regional Oral

History Office, lightly edited, and the transcript sent to George
Maslach for review. He made several minor clarifications of diction and
returned the transcript promptly. The manuscript was corrected and
indexed at our office. Jim Kantor, University Archivist emeritus, who
did the meticulous proofreading of the final transcript, spotted very
few details with which he could quarrel. The tapes are deposited in The
Bancroft Library and are available for study.

The Regional Oral History Office was established in 1954 to

augment through tape-recorded memoirs the Library s materials on the
 xi

history of California and the West. Copies of all interviews are

available for research use in The Bancroft Library and in the UCLA
Department of Special Collections. The office is under the direction of
Willa K. Baum, Division Head, and the administrative direction of
Charles B. Faulhaber, James D. Hart Director of The Bancroft Library,
University of California, Berkeley.

Eleanor Swent
Senior Editor

March 2000
Regional Oral History Office
The Bancroft Library
University of California, Berkeley
 xii

Regional Oral History Office University of California

Room 486 The Bancroft Library Berkeley, California 94720

BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION

(Please write clearly. Use black

Your full name

Date of birth

Father s full name

Occupation /^^/

Mother s full name

Occupation

Your spouse

--
Where did you grow up? /^ - (A

Present community

Education

Occupation(s)

Areas of expertise

Other interests or activities

Organizations in which you are active /A ^ i^

SIGNATURE
 xiii

DEDICATION

A Good "Staff" at Home

Maslach: To me, this oral history is going to be most valuable when read
by our children, their children, and their children s children.
About the time I became dean, our family had a record of vacation
in the high country in the Sierras, backpacking, fishing, skiing,
doing a little bit of everything. And I realized during my
career and after my career, that one of the greatest things I had
was a good--quote--staf f--quote--at home. Starting with my wife
Doris, and children Christina, Jamie, and Steve. I really had
total support, not in any explicit fashion, but it was always
amazing how we could get together and not talk over engineering
problems, but talk over global problems, and vacation problems,
and so on, and come to agreement and have a very happy home life.
It so happened that the deanship, for example, coincided with the
period when the children were going through adolescence, twelve,
fourteen, sixteen. This was of course a rough time in all
families, a difficult time, really, but not a horrible time for
us.

I always like to think that that support came in part from a

statement that I once made on a backpack adventure where we were
facing disaster. Three burros that we had, had dashed off
somewhere with all of our camping equipment, food, and everything
else. And we were searching for where those burros went. We
found them rather quickly, but I at one point made the statement,
"Don t worry, if everybody does more than their share, we ll have
no problems." And I think that what has happened is, my family
has always given me more than their share, and that s why I have
had no problems. Okay.

Swent : That is a wonderful tribute.

Maslach: Well, it is really quite true. 1 have thought of it separately,

and if I were to do this thing [the oral history] over again, I
would shorten down various things a little, and I don t think I
said enough about the wonderful times we as a family had. I know
I talked about it a little bit in the sabbatical leave and so on,
but you know, going to ski school in the Austrian Alps for
example, that was great. [laughs] And doing all these kind of
things: sailing, sailing a lot. I have some wonderful pictures
of our grandchildren sailing. About three or four months ago,
Steve and his family came down from Seattle and we went sailing.
I got one picture of Dillon at the tiller and another one of
Jamie at the tiller. I didn t pose them; these are all candid--
but I got everybody in. And everybody who sees these pictures
always makes very complimentary remarks. So we are now into the
next generation.
 I EARLY YEAIU

[Interview 1: August 20, 1998] ////

Family in Poland

Maslach: I hate to start off this great project with a note of sadness,
but two days ago, August 18th, in the morning, Frances Eberhart
died in Santa Barbara. I received the notification shortly
thereafter. She was one of the long-time workers in the College
of Engineering, and believe it or not, I met her first in 1941,
when I was a student. She gave me my first paycheck when I was
research assistant for then-Professor Morrough P. O Brien, later
Dean O Brien.
"Mike"

I have given to you two sheets of paper, which are histories

of my family: my father s family and my mother s. My father was
born in a small town close to the city of Zakapone. Zakapone is
in the Tatra Mountains of Poland, bordering Czechoslovakia.
Zakapone is well known as the site of the Winter Olympics after
World War II, the only time that I think any Olympic activity was
ever held in Poland.

Swent : Would you mind spelling that?

Maslach: Z-a-k-a-p-o-n-e My mother was born in a suburb of Krakow.

. The
name of the town is Sosnowiec. Sosnowiec is now part of greater
Krakow and is not a separate city of its own. The area of
Krakow, to bring it up to modern times, is close to the infamous
camp of Auchswitz. Maybe twenty miles away from where my mother
was born and raised.

Swent: Have you visited these places?

!
This symbol indicates that a tape or tape segment has begun or ended
//#

A guide to the tapes follows the transcript.

Maslach: I have not visited Poland at all, for a very strange reason. My
passport was limited for years. I could not travel behind the
Iron Curtain. My daughter, Christina, professor here in
Berkeley, a professor of psychology, has visited there and has
actually visited not only Krakow-Sosnowiec, but met with
relatives, one of whom has now died, and also went to Zakapone,
where she drew a blank and could not find our background there.
The distance between Zakapone and Sosnowiec was only about fifty
miles, Zakapone being to the south.

My father s name, M-a-s-1-a-c-h, if pronounced in Slavic

tongue, would be "MASH-lak." In fact, you will often see it
spelled in Polish-type literature with a slash through the middle
of the and that changes the pronunciation of the
"1," The
"1."

first part of the name, Mash, is "butter" in Polish. Therefore,

my father was involved in a farm. The family was. But Maslach
means "butter mushroom," and you can ^buy jars of maslachy in
gourmet stores. A friend of mine actually sent me a jar from a
store back in New York.

Also, you find the name spelled differently if it is, say,

in Yugoslavia, and one of the biggest butter producers in
Yugoslavia for many years was M-a-s-1-a-c, which is more the
Slovakian spelling, and they turned out butter [chuckles]. They
had these little golden wrappers for the butter, that you see in
restaurants here, with their name on it, and next to their name
was their logo, which was a little buttercup. And if you were up
in northern Poland, for example, Maslach there means "buttercup."

Swent: The flower.

Maslach: The flower. So therefore I figure that my father and his family
were involved in either the production or gathering or growing of
mushrooms and harvesting mushrooms. This area where he came from
is a very scenic area of Poland, and one of the things that makes
it most scenic is the costuming of the people, both men and
women, the women wearing a traditional costume: skirts with lots
of ribbons in horizontal rows and kind of a red bolero. Of
course, all decorated with beads and everything else.

The men s costume is very unique. It s made of wool, and

much of the wool used is pressed wool. In other words, it s not
woven. And things that you will notice are that the man wears a
jacket, but he only has his left arm through the left arm of the
jacket, and the right arm is free, and the coat sort of slings
down the back, and there is a cord that goes from the right side
of the jacket and holds it on him. In other words, he has one
hand free.
Swent :
Very interesting.

Maslach: I don t know the reason for this. I ve asked many times and many
people, but have never figured it out. The hat is broad-brimmed
and flat and is like a skullcap on the top. It kind of reminds
you of papal hats that you would see the cardinals and the Pope
wearing. The brim has a lift up, very graceful. And then the
pants are very tight. They re best described as what are called
leggings today that women wear. They re form-fitting on the leg,
all the way down to the ankle. Then whatever shoes or boots that
are necessary for the time.

These men always carry what looks almost like a hockey club
[chuckles], for field hockey and so on. It is actually an axe.
You see pictures of this costume all the time, touting southern
Poland. I think I might get there one of these days. I
certainly would like to look it over.

Swent: Did your family have any of these kinds of clothing that they
brought with them?

Maslach: No. Living in San Francisco, as I will be getting to, an

important organization still exists in San Francisco, on 16th and
Shotwell, in the Mission District, is the Polish House, or Dom
Polski. Our family--my father especiallywas fully involved in
the various groups that use this former church for social events.
Many, many times there were plays. In fact, it was a rather
constant thing to have an evening in which you go and see this
play, which is a traditional, old, you know, Polish play, and
then after the play was over, moving the chairs back, opening up
the dance floor, and there s a bar and you can buy a certain
amount of food and so on. Of course, there were just dances
where it s just dancing, but quite often there would be this
social gathering. And in these plays, all of these costumes
would be seen. In the dancing, for example, the Krakoviak, which
is a dance, which is very fast and very physical, these costumes
are a primary part of it.

But getting back to my father s family, we never were able

to maintain good, close relationships with them by mail. My
mother s family were politically active, something my father was
here in the United States for many, many years. We were never
quite sure whether our loss of contact happened in World War II,
but people were disappearing right and left.

And the most recent example- -kind of jumping up to a few

years agowas the name listed there [indicating the list of
names] in my mother s family, the bottom name, I believe, died in
 Poland. He was a labor organizer in the coal mines and steel
^.ndustry, which is near Krakow.

Swent : Tadeusz?

Maslach: Yes. He was put into prison by the Soviets, who were in control
then, and he just disappeared. Their family was told he died, so
they know nothing. Those were the conditions. While I m quite
satisfied to know that my father in that area was a farmer,
because that s all there was down there, my mother s family in
Sosnowiec had the wonderful, difficult name Pszczolkowska. You
can see the writing of it: P-s-z-c-z [chuckles]. There s no
vowel, you will notice; but the combination of those five
letters, P-s-z-c-z, gives a vowel-like sound to the enunciation.
Her family was, as she always put it, minor nobility. Pictures
we have of the family and so on show they obviously lived in a
good house. Rooms were large and comfortable, wood panelled and
things like that. And the people, especially pictures of mothers
and grandmothers, they always looked more urban and more modern
in dress and so on.

There s no fame in Poland. That is, if every noble had a

dog and the dog sat in the middle of the noble s land, the tail
would be wagging over the neighbor s land. In other words,
nobility was not very rich. There were some that were very, very
small. I don t know that my mother s family owned any great
property. They lived in the city, Sosnowiec. But they seemed to
be, for their time and for their place, fairly well off. Not
well off by our standards, at all.

Immigrating to America, 1904

Maslach: So the story starts with the two families separately moving,
during the great migration, out of Europe to come to the United
States.

My father and his brother came to visit a relative who was

living in the Polish community just south of Chicago. He stayed
there for a while, but there was this enormous need for people on
the West Coast, much like we had in World War II, for example.

Swent: This was in 1906?

Maslach: That s correct.

Swent: The early part of the century.

Maslach: Yes. But there was this great need to rebuild San Francisco.

Swent: After the earthquake.

Maslach: Just like Kaiser [Company] had trainloads of people to come to

work in the shipyards in World War II, the very same thing was
true after the earthquake and fire, and so there was a free ride
to California. Many times I remember talking to my father, and
one of the things, of course, that always stood out in my memory
was something that he said that I heard from many other people as
well. He said, Poland, they truly believed that in San
"In

Francisco you could walk down the street and kick up a pebble and
look at it and pick up a nugget of gold." The streets had gold.
And he says--he remembered this vividly. Of course, he was born
in the eighties, but that was still a very lively topic of
discussion and California, of course, was the land.

So when he had a chance, he moved to San Francisco. My

father s schooling essentially ended somewhere like in the middle
of high school. I don t think it was a full twelve years as we
have here in the United States; more like ten years. And much of
the latter time, in senior and junior year levels, was in a trade
school. He was educated to be a machinist, so he had good
ability with machine tools, repairing things, and so on.

Swent: What kind of machines would they have been?

Maslach: Well, they had the full complement of lathes and milling machines
and so on. He knew how to use those machines, all belt-driven
machines, of course. He was not a welder, but he did know an
enormous amount about plumbing and carpentry, the type of trade
school education that you would get, especially in a remote,
rural area of Poland.

On the other hand, my motherher education, the last year

or so, was educated as a seamstress, and so she was very good
with sewing machines and needles. In fact, we still have the
original Singer sewing machine, which is a real antique. It
still works perfectly. I remember her on that machine many
times.

She came with her two sisters, listed in there, Peggy and
Jenny. The statement there is my sister saying that my mother
came with Jenny. Actually, all three came together. They came
at a period, in their young teens, from Poland at the turn of the
century all the way to Californiathey came straight to
California. They had a relative here who lived, actually, on
Poznan Avenue in Berkeley. Poznan is the name of a Polish city
 [laughs]. I always thought that was rather interesting that he,
as an old Polish immigrant, would be living on such a street.

I remember going to his house many times when I was young,

and he would just take me to a back window and point, and there
was the Campanile [chuckles]. So it s in the north side of
Berkeley, more on the flat than up on the hill, but right near
where the train used to go. He used to commute over to San
Francisco.

Swent : How did your father feel about not finding the streets paved with
gold?

Maslach: I think that he realizedhe was a very sharp man--he realized

that this was a mythology, but he did expect there would be
greater job opportunities, and of course there were, enormously
better than the steel mills where all my other relatives worked
in the Midwest.

Swent :
Chicago.

Maslach: Yes. Imet many of them later. One, in fact, had risen from
being amachinist in the sceel mills up to a vice presidency of a
steel company [chuckles].

Swent : He did well.

Maslach: Yes. Johnny was one of the best as far as moving ahead. A
wonderful personality. Wonderful ability to get along with
people .

But to get back to their coming, basically when they got

here, separately, they were immediately put to work. Of the three
girls, Peggy, the oldest, was always more of a--she always acted
more as though she was better than the others and she was
wealthier than the others or whatever. She was the matriarch of
the three girls [chuckles]. Jenny and my mothermore of the
opposite. They sort of hung together better, more. And I know
my mother did go to work in a clothing firm, sewing. It s
amazing to think how generations have done the same thing. This
generation, you started sewing. Go to Chinatown today. This
generation now is sewing.

My father, on the other hand, went to work, and he worked

for Southern Pacific for a while. They had their big shops in
southern San Francisco, but they also had other shops up in the
city. I d like to kind of digress from the people to pointing
out something about how I remember basically another era, because
the city, when they arrived, was just being rebuilt after the
 earthquake and fire, and when I was born in 1920, it had been, of
course, well rebuilt. But you have to remember that in those
days-- 1920, let s say--the population of the state of California
was three million people. Today s it s thirty-three million
people.

Three million. Two million were down in southern

California; a million were scattered up here in Sacramento, San
Francisco, Oakland, and so on. San Francisco population was of
the order of one hundred thousand, which is Berkeley today but
spread over a larger region, or two hundred thousand at the very
maximum. 1 remember in 1930, you could bicycle or skate out to
the Sunset District, and for miles there was nothing but sand
dunes. There wasn t a house. And if you took a streetcar to
Stern Grove or Fleischhacker for example, you d go for miles
,

through truck gardens, if you went one way, Visitation Valley; or

you d just go through these sand dunes for miles. And that was
the kind of city we had at that time.

All big cities, of course, are divided into neighborhoods.

In this period it was probably the heyday of ethnicity, even more
so than it is today, because you had an Italian section in North
Beach, and a Chinese section and you had a big Japanese section,
a Jewish section, you had Polish, Slavic, Russian sections. The
Russian section was out there in the Richmond District, where the
two big churches still are.

Potrero Hill, San Francisco s Polish Neighborhood

Maslach: But the Poles, Yugoslavs, and others sort of settled around
Potrero Hill, and the Mission District, that side of the Mission
District. Remember where the San Francisco General Hospital is.
That was essentially where the Polish neighborhood was. Dom
Polski was just down the street, as I told you.

So I was born. We were living on Shotwell Street.

Swent : How did your parents meet each other?

Maslach: They met at the Dom Polski [laughs].

Swent: At one of the functions?

Maslach: Yes, one of the functions, of course, socializing and so on, so

they met there. My father was about five foot eleven, strong,
built like a fireplug. He was not stout, but he was very strong.
 He was very gregarious. He was a good orator, and he always
became the leader, the president of every society at one time or
another that was there. I imagine he was considered a good catch
because he had a job which was a notch up, a machinist.

My mother, on the other hand, was about five foot one, maybe
five foot zero, to be frank. She was small, petite, never heavy.
I resemble her physically, facially, more than I resemble my
father. My brother, Michael, who was four years older than 1, he
resembled much more my father.

Swent : You are very tall.

Maslach: True. Of course, part of that is that we live in California and

the climate is good, and the diet is very, very good.

Swent : How tall are you?

Maslach: Six foot four, a hundred and ninety-five pounds. I m blessed

with having a very fixed weight and skeletal frame. I ve never
dieted or anything. I ve always been slender, when I was in
grade school, my parents always wanted me to be heavier. I
remember having to drink Ovaltine, things like that, to put on
weight.

The three girls--my mother and two sisters seemed to settle

pretty well when they got here. Worked; they met people, you
know, and then they got married. Jenny moved over here to
Oakland and lived in Oakland.

Swent : Where did they live? How would three unmarried girls manage?
Boarding houses?

Maslach: Boarding house, oh, yes. Everybody. Men and women. Boarding
houses were everywhere. May I digress a moment because I
remember boarding houses later on, even in the forties. Take
Grant Avenue, North Beach. The Tivoli Restaurant is still there.
I remember walking the street, and out of Tivoli came a man with
a school bell, a hand bell that he rang in the middle of the
street, and there were all these flats and houses, boarding
houses, nearby, and people would come down. That was a signal
for the first seating at the Tivoli. So they would all go in and
have their meal at the first sitting. And then there was an hour
and fifteen minutes, an hour and twenty minutes later, there was
another ringing, and there was a second sitting. This was
common, very common in San Francisco.

I remember seeing this even when I was younger, down in the

Mission District. Potrero Hill, especially. Potrero Hill was an
 interesting place. It had been, for good reason, an area where
some well-to-do people built houses, but it kind of got run down,
for a variety of reasons, and it became a second-class
neighborhood. Now it s being gentrified again. The last
occupants of that area, who are slowly being pushed out, are the
small number of blacks, primarily those who came from the housing
project on the side of Potrero Hill, and the Mexican-Americans.
Recently there are a lot of gang rumbles there. In my day gang
warfare was a pretty common thing.

Swent: Oh, really?

Maslach: Oh, yes.

So, getting back [chuckles] again, my parents got married

and--

Swent : What sort of wedding did they have?

Maslach: I have pictures of the wedding. There is one picture especially

in which my father and my mother to some extent were wearing
costumes. It must have been a reception after the marriage
ceremony.

Swent: There were no parents, of course.

Maslach: No. There were lots of friends. The party at the table was
maybe twenty people.

Swent: Which church were they married in? Do you know?

Maslach: That I don t recall. I could find out, probably.

Swent: Was it a Polish church?

Maslach: Yes, one of the churches in that area, and that s

it had to be,
what I cannot recall. I remember going with my mother to St.
Anne s, which was in the Sunset District, because, if you
remember the Polish religion--! mean, the Catholic religion-
saints days, which is your name day, are important, sometimes
more important than anything else you might be dealing with. So
I recall St. Anne s Day, going out there, walking in the
procession with my mother and so on.

Swent: Your mother s name was Anna. When were your parents married?
 10

Maslach: I was born in 1920. My sister i.n six years older. She,
therefore, was born i:i 1914. They were I ve forgotten. I think
it was 1912, 13. Good Catholics, they started a family.

Swent: I wondered whether the First World War had any- -effect.

Maslach: It did have an effect, not so much--it had several effects, yes.
But let me kind of lead into this more. They got married, and
the thing that you have to remember is that everyone from Poland
especially, and Europe, I should say, the whole theme was to move
ahead, the American Dream. And one big part of the American
Dream was to own property, so my father was a compulsive worker,
and I think many times in his life he was holding down two jobs.
Certainly during the Depression he did; I know that. So his
skills were available, and he always had a job, never lacked a
job.

We moved from Shotwell Street, which is an interesting

street. I drove down it, oh, about a couple of years ago.

Reminiscing again--! just happened to be in the neighborhood with

my wife. We were seeing a play, a dance operation, which was
off -Broadway type thing, way down on Shotwell Street. I said,
"Oh, I remember this." [chuckles] I finally figured out which
was the house.

Shotwell Street was an upscale street for that neighborhood

because it was the only street in that area that had trees
planted on it. Both sidewalks had trees the full length. Today
about half the trees are still there. You can see where it was
row housing, a lot of the same Victorian type things, not the
best Victorians, but good Victorians. So that s where we were
born.

Swent: They ve lasted all this time.

Maslach: Yes. It s, again, an area which surprisingly is being gentrified

right now. Shotwell is considered to be a good street. In my
day, the south end of Shotwell Street, you were in the factories.
The north end, of course, you were eventually into the farms.
But basically that was a very interesting street to be living on.

Childhood in the Mission District

Maslach: We moved from Shotwell Street to a house on Mission. Mission, of

course, being the longest street there is in San Francisco; goes
on for miles and miles. Our house was at the corner of Mission
 11

and Army. Army is a main cross street. The house is no longer

there because Army was widened, and they widened it on our side,
for obvious reasons, and took out the house on that side. But it
was a big house, and we shared two flats.

It had a very large garden. My father loved to garden. He

would just be in the garden whenever he could. He loved to raise
fruits and veggies. We were out in the garden. I even remember
a picture in which I m very young and pulling at a strawberry
plant to see if there were strawberries in it [laughs], which I
would pick and eat. But this was where I think- -my memory kind
of first starts on Mission Street. It was a neighborhood street,
and this was the "Far Mission".

Swent : Was this still Polish?

Maslach: No, it is all Latino.

Swent: No, I meant at that time.

Maslach: At that time--

Swent : Were you still in a Polish neighborhood?

Maslach: I would broaden that to say that we were Slavic. We had an awful
lot of workers. It was a working-class neighborhood, and it was
close to machine shops, industrial activity, and it was close to
get down to South San Francisco, which was heavy industry. I
have memories of this which are really quite clear. For example,
south from our house, across Army Street, was an enormous vacant
area. Had been, of course, farming land. The exciting thing was
that s where Barnum and Bailey Circus set up. In those days,
there would always be the big parade through town with all the
animals and so on, and they ended up practically in our front
yard .

Swent: How exciting for a boy.

Maslach: I remember watching elephants being used to raise the canvas, you
know. The big top went up with all these elephants. It was a
great show. We went there, of course; as one of the neighborhood
kids--I was young at that timebut I would follow my older
brother and we would sneak into the sideshows or this or that,
and they didn t mind. You know, the young kids in the
neighborhood. I remember that circus vividly. It was, as I
said, just across the street.

Swent: How exciting!

 12

Maslach: It was not a wide street then. It was a narrow street

[chuckles]. But there we rented. The whole thing was then to
start getting property.

Swent : Did your mother work outside the home at all?

Maslach: At that point, my mother s work was in the home. If she did any
sewing, she did it in the home. I distinctly remember, and I can
even tell you and describe, for example, coats that she made, the
winter coats. She would buy the material and, of course, the
patterns and do all the work herself very quickly, very easily,
surprisingly fast.

Swent: Did people come to the house for fittings, or were they sent out?

Maslach: These coats were coats for us.

Swent: Oh, for you.

Maslach: I remember having the fittings and so on. You know, she would
start in the morning and by the time the afternoon was finished,
why, you had a coat.

Swent: Oh, my. She was very good then.

Maslach: Surprisingly fast. And right to old age. She was very good with
sewing.

We had sort of a bucolic, farm style of living at that

point, with that big, big yard in back. I mean, it was fifty
feet long and thirty-five feet wide. The house had a thirty-
five-foot lot.

Swent: Did you ever have chickens or anything--

Maslach: No, we didn t have chickens, but there were chickens in the area.
All kinds of animals, in fact. You could hear cows and chickens
all the time, roosters every morning.

Father s Job at Leighton Industries

Maslach: But we moved because my father got a very fine job, which he held
essentially for the rest of his normal working life--he continued
working right on till he diedbut there was an organization
known as Leighton Industries: L-E-I-G-H-T-O-N. I think that s
the way it was spelled. Mr. Leighton, who became a good friend
 13

of ours, and his family- -they lived out in St. Francis Wood, in a
big house--he had about fifteen restaurants and what were called
in those days "Dairy Lunches". In other words, it was a small
cafeteria or short-order type place that you would walk into and
pick up a breakfast or lunch or dinner.

Well, I don t know how he found out about my father, but--

maybe he was called in to do some work for a friend of his or
something like that but my father could repair any of those
equipments, and these were all big restaurant equipments and, of
course, the plumbing problems you always have in restaurants, and
then electrical. So he was the maintainer of all of these
equipments on these restaurants. There was one, for example, a
Leighton Dairy Lunch down by the Ferry Building, a big restaurant
on Fifth and Market. There were others further up Market Street.
There was one on Golden Gate Avenue and Larkin, just two blocks
from where we lived, later, and one down on Eddy Street. So they
were all over the downtown.

Swent : How did your father go to work?

Maslach: Well, the headquarters was the main restaurant down on Fifth and
Market, which is where Eddy Street comes in and Powell, right
there where the Powell turntable is. And this is what changed
our life because we moved from the Mission District, and the
first place we moved to was a place on Baker Street, which is
fairly close to Lone Mountain, right up on the slopes of Baker,
on the northern end of Baker, where it ran into the old
cemeteries. We had a flat, and we were renting. We used to play
in the street. It was Turk Street, up against the cemeteries
there. Sand would blow from the cemeteries onto the streets, and
the cars would not be able to use the street much because there
were always these sand dunes.

I recall one day, just beginning school age, and we were

playing stickball, batting the ball, and somebody hit this ball
into the sand dune area on the side of the cemetery, and there
were some shrubs and scrub, so I ran after the ball and oops!
There was a dead man.

Swent: Oh, my.

Maslach: A gun was in his hands, a big hole right in his chest. He had
been there for some while. I got out of there [chuckles] and
called everybody over. "What do we do?" [laughs] One of the
kid s family lived on Turk, and we all ran over there and told
the mother. The mother came over and looked. Not everybody had
a telephone in those days. You had to find somebody with a
telephone and call in the cops, and they came. In those days,
 the cops wore the long, tunic-type coats that came down to their
knees. They had the old round-topped hats, really old-fashioned
[chuckles]. I remember the cops there, and answering questions.
I said, just went in for the ball."
"I
[chuckles] fact,
"In

here s the ball." We got the ball. So this was sort of an area
where I started developing friends and going to school.

Swent: Which school? Where did you start school?

Maslach: There was a school on Golden Gate Avenue, one block south and
about two blocks over.

Swent: Was this first grade?

Maslach: Yes, first grade.

Swent: Or kindergarten?

Maslach: No kindergarten.

Swent: Did you speak Polish in your home?

Maslach: I m glad you brought that up because in the beginning we did

speak Polish in the home when I was very little.

Swent: Your parents spoke Polish to each other?

Maslach: Yes. But at one point there, my father just made the decision
that it was wrong for us to be speaking so much Polish because we
were speaking with a very obvious accent when we spoke English.
He says, are now Americans." He and my mother continued- -and
"We

every once in a while we would say something in Polish, but from

then on he said, "English."

Swent: How did your parents learn English?

Maslach: I never found that out, really. Both my father and mother spoke
excellent English.

Swent: They must have gone to night classes?

Maslach: They might have gone to night classes, although I never heard
either of them say that. They were very linguistic, especially
my father. You mentioned the World War, did that have an effect.

Swent: World War I.

Maslach: World War I. And it did because my father was sort of prominent
in the society, several societies, was well known for his
 15

linguistic ability. He spoke Polish and English very well, but

he also spoke Russian very well and any number of Slavic
languages from the southern part of Europe. In fact, he used to
brag to me that he could listen to a man speaking and tell you
roughly where that man came from, by the linguistic differences
in the basic Slavic language, because there are all kinds of
dialects. I mean, in Croatia, Bosnia, and so on, it s not one

language, really. It s almost by district, you know. So he was

very well read.

In fact, I have a little book of his, in Polish, which he

carried when he came from Poland, a little, tiny pocket book that
you would slip into your pocket if you re on an airplane ride
today and he would read these essays. I always remember that the
part that was most used and thumbed was an essay, Brother,"
"My

so probably it referred to the brother, who stayed, because

basically, as you could tell, we re dealing here with families
coming from Europe, and the reason they re coming is that with
the primogeniture type of operation in Europe, any of the younger
children would have to leave, so he was one of the younger
children. So was my mother [chuckles]. So they just left.

Swent : So they did both learn good English.

Maslach: Oh, yes, excellent English. I ll speak to this more and more.

Swent: Before you started school then, you did know both Englishyou
had already learned English before you started school.

Maslach: Oh, my mother was dedicated to our education, and my father, of

course, knew we were going to college. This was, of course, the
great dream of all this society. My father, in fact, spelled it
out that the two sons one should be a lawyer and the other
should be a doctor. Boy, isn t this standard thinking! Of
course, the daughter, forget it.

Swent: She might marry a doctor or a lawyer.

Maslach: But it was never in the plans. But just sticking with the period
there, my mother would go to school and buy used textbooks,
beginning textbooks, so even before I was in the first, second
grade, I was reading textbooks. And, of course, I had a brother
four years older and a sister six years older, so I was that last
sibling.

Swent: Were there just the three children?

Maslach: What happened was that in 1918 another child was born.
 16

Swent : One who dies.

Maslach: One who dies, Stanislaus, Stanley. The flu epidemic.

Swent: That was the other effect of World War 1.

Maslach: Yes, that s the other effect of World War I. Years later I
learned from my mother directly that I was the spare. They
decided to have me because of Stan dying, the whole concept of
heir and a spare" type of a thing, so my being born was an
"an

afterthought. If Stanley had lived, I was not in the picture at

all.

Swent: That s interesting, too, because that brings up the issue of

family planning, which must have been--

Maslach: They were, quote, "good Catholics," but just as one of the top
people, laymen in the Catholic religion that I met in Austria,
oh, twenty years ago, when I was doing consultingso I asked him
bluntly, "How come Austria, which is a Catholic country, has an
absolute flat population?" Birth rate equalling the death rate.
In fact, there s no migration in or out, basically, in Austria.
He looked at me; he said, "The pill." Obviously, children were
born, two years apart--BING, BING--two children, you know?
Obviously, there was Planned Parenthood or something.

So with my being born [chuckles] as the spare, you know, and

the concept, still, of primogeniture, my brother was the favorite
son, and I was able to get away with murder and do things on my
own to a far greater extent than he was.

Swent: It didn t matter so much?

Maslach: No. He was a very good student, scholarship student and

everything else, and he became a lawyer. But here s a small
story which will come up later again: when I became dean, it was
impressed upon my mother by other people that this was a
magnificent position, that I was some sort of a high-level person
here at the university. And she said, Father were alive
"If

today, okay, you didn t become a doctor, but I think he would

appreciate this." Would have approved of my being dean,
[chuckles]

There was a period when my brother s wife, when asked about

me, would say, "Oh, he does something over at the university."
And she knew nothing about it. So finally, one day a student
told her, "You don t know what you re talking about!" He told
her all these things, and she never knew!
 17

Well, getting back, as I said, this is where I think my

childhood jumped from being in the family to being now with
neighbor children. Playing in the streets and so on. And we
visited people. A Greek couple lived down on Baker Street a few
blocks away. We used to love to go down there because they were
such a wonderful couple, such wonderful people.

McAllister Street and the Benedettis

Maslach: And then we moved to a better flat on McAllister Street, right

near where the car barn for the Market Street Railroad was the
Green Cars, in those days. It was only three or four block move
from where we were living, but this was a big family, the
Benedettis. They ran a big coal and wood sales program. We
lived above the coal and wood yard in the top flat. There were
two or three male children and Esther, the daughter, the older
daughter. And a big Italian family.

This is where I have great, great memories because I m now

in school and walking to school just about three or four blocks
and working and playing with these people. There were also
horses. Horse and carriages were quite common.

Swent: Still? In the twenties?

Maslach: I remember in Mission Street seeing "Sunny Jim" Rolph, mayor of

the city, going by on Sunday morning, horse and buggy, top hat,
formal. You ve seen pictures of him, maybe. This was the way he
dressed all the time. You know, the swallowtail coat and pants,
formal pants and so on. And just a few blocks away from us, on
Mission and Army, was--I think the place was called Woodward s
Garden. There was more than one of these places. Big areas, two
or three blocks square, beautifully landscaped, with trees and
shrubs and so on. Dance halls, bowling alleys, picnic areas, a
band playing. Quite often more like the German "oompah" band.
And you would go there for Sundays.

And you were out in the country because these places were
really the edge of the city, and this great palatial home that
you would see right there. It was just surrounded by country,
you know, and wonderful landscaping around the house. It was
Rolph s palatial residence. And he went from that residence down
to City Hall in a horse and carriage.

Swent: Oh, for heaven s sake. I asked earlier, how did your father go
to work? How did he get around?
 18

Maslach: Well, the trolley system in San Francisco was extremely good.
There were two companies: the Market Street Railroad and the
MUNI. The MUNI was kind of a dull grey car and was prominent on
Market Street and then it branched off. Geary was one of the
main streets it branched off on. But it also went up to Duboce
and went through the tunnel. Now we re getting into another
area, you know, the Upper Mission. Eventually, of course, the
cars went with the tunnel through the Twin Peaks. So the
trolleys were used, and used heavily. There were no buses at
that time.

There was big rivalry. On Market Street there were four

tracks: two going to the Ferry Building and two leaving. The
inner tracks were the Market Street Railroad, and the outer
tracks were the MUNI. And these cars would race down. It was
worth your life! And cars came quickly, too. It was very well
done. We had a very good transit system, believe it or not. For
example, when we were living out there in McAllister, all he did
was take the trolley and he would go maybe two miles and there is
Fifth and Market.

The thing I really remember about the Benedettis was that

they made wine. Of course, this was the Prohibition days, and
theoretically, if you read the law, you can only make as much
wine for yourself, for home consumption. I have vivid memories,
to this minute, of sitting on the stacks of coal--you know, these
are bags, hemp bags. And I would sit up there on those bags and
watch all the adult men working, making wine. What they did was
they would stack the bags of wood and coal in such a way so that
behind them was this great, thousand-gallon vat, so you would
have red wine. They would bring the grapes in with their big
coal truck. They would put an edge of coal bags on the truck
filled with coal, and in the center would be a couple of tons of
grapes. And so they would back the truck down, and they d be
taking off these boxes of grapes and putting them up to the press
where they would be ground, and they would make the wine.

Swent :
They made it right there.

Maslach: In fact, they sold it, illegally, to anybody that was a customer.
And also, they made good wine. They would sell it to restaurants
and so on.

Swent: Did they bottle it?

Maslach: They bottled, but it was always in bulk. I never remembered

anything less than a gallon. The big demijohns were the main
thing. Five-gallon, ten-gallon, covered with hemp. They would
have this all in the center of the truck, and go to some place,
 19

unload coal and wood and look around and then unload the wine,
[chuckles]

II

Swent: You ve been talking about the Benedettis and their wine
operation, and then you went back after World War II?

Maslach: Telegraph Hill, 1950, everybody was still making wine. And so it
was rather common to help people. I found out that the man next
door was a very good winemaker, but he was getting pretty old, so
I made a deal with him that we would buy the grapes, if he would
supervise the operation. He had the vat and everything right in
his basement. And so we ordered a ton of grapes. I was into the
deal for a barrel of wine. Other neighbors were also in on it as
well. The whole community, maybe eight of us, you know, just all
had part of this wine. When the grapes came, why, we all hustled
the grapes down and crushed them, and every night we would go
down there. We had to push down the crust, the grape skins and
the stems and so on that floats you have to move it out of the
top so that the oxygen can get in. It was a lot of work and, of
course, drinking a lot of wine, you know. I was doing this even
when I was thirty years old.

Swent: But it was above board then.

Maslach: Yes. Of course, everybody would dump their grape residues, and
in San Francisco, especially the North Beach area, down around
the empty lots and on the waterfront there would be tons of these
pressings .

Swent: This is back, now, in the thirties that you re talking about.

Maslach: Not only the thirties but in the fifties. And it smelled to high
heaven. It would attract flies and so on. This was all done at
night [chuckles] so nobody knew who dumped that particular batch
of pressings.

Swent: I was thinkingthe Benedettis operation, you must have been

able to smell this wine making, couldn t you?

Maslach: Well, yes, I m sure you could. However, you have to remember, it
was a coal and wood operation there, and you could smell the coal
dust and the wood, too.

Swent: As well.

Maslach: As well. Finally, the one thing that you know, I mentioned
horses. There were horses everywhere. I mean, the rags-bottle-
 20

sacks man, even up to the forties, up to World War II, would come
around with horses, buying paper, magazines, bottles, rags.
Sacks was the big thing. A lot of merchandise was moved with
hemp sacks. So we stayed there with the Benedettis. This was a
big family. You know Italian families. Every Sunday there is
this enormous meal. You just couldn t believe the amount of food
that was cooked, especially in a big family.

I had started in school. Of course, my brother and sister

were ahead of me, so I was just kind of trotting along, not too
many people paying much attention to me. I soon got the
reputation for being a wanderer. I hiked a lot when I was older,
but even when I was young, I would be all over the city. For
example, in the cemetery area. We used to go up to Lone Mountain
and get wooden barrels, and we would roll them up the hill, the
ends of the barrels being knocked out, and you would roll down
the hill.

Swent : In the barrel?

Maslach: In the barrel. It was all sand. Just enormous amounts of sand
in this area. You would play in that area. Up on Lone Mountain
you could see a lot further, you know, and other places to
explore. My brother being older, he was a bit of a wanderer too.
We just hiked around a good deal in those days, starting at that
point .

Swent: Did you inherit your father s mechanical interests?

Maslach: I ll get to that. That s a very special part of my upbringing,

so to speak. To finish sort of the Benedettis, it was I think
where I went from family in the Mission District to the family
with neighbors, playing, then Baker Street, now the family in a
social kind of a sense. In other words, we were two close-knit
families, living in the same house.

Father s Political Interests

Swent: Were your mother and Mrs. Benedetti friends?

Maslach: Oh, yes. Everybody was friendly. My father and mother were
outgoing people, my father especially. Before I get too far
along, I want to get back into the period which you asked about
which was World War I. I told you my father was quite gifted
linguistically. Since he was well known as president of various
groups in the Polish society there, his name was prominent.
 21

Swent : What were these groups?

Maslach: Well, sort of different groups that you would have in any kind of
club arrangement today. There was an interest group in dancing,
maintaining the knowledge of the different dances and so on.
There was always an interest group- -he was heavily involved in
the plays and the literature. I was, even as a young boy,
reading Sienkiewicz and others. Quo Vadis was something I read
when I was very young. And so those were other interest groups
within Dom Polski.

But then they became political groups as well. You have to

remember the population was small. There were no blacks in San
Francisco then. I truly mean you could walk across the city back
and forth, any area, and there wasn t a black face. Chinatown,
yes. Japantown, yes. Mexican-Americans, there was a small
community in North Beach, which was at the end of Broadway. Their
church is there, Catholic church, just where the tunnel starts on
the Broadway side.

The city was very much an ethnic division city, as I said

earlier. When we moved to McAllister Street, I didn t realize
that just down about three or four blocksmore than that; I mean
six blocks it was heavily Jewish, and in the stores they spoke
Hebrew and Yiddish. The signs were in Hebrew and so on. This
will come out later, but I got to know Yehudi Menuhin [chuckles].
So we were very knowledgeable of the differences, but there was a
very easy mixture, but every ethnic group had its political
group. My father, since he was so prominent in all of these
interest groups, became an active political person.

So in World War I, because he was a linguist, the army-navy

people, the military people found out about him, and they came to
our house. They had letters and documents they would ask him to
translate. Somebody would be writing down as he translated these
things. And some of these things were in strange tongues, as far
as they were concerned, and they were not the major languages
that they were familiar with. To what extent there was a
surveillance, not as bad as World War II, where they sent the
Japanese away, it was a surveillance of ethnic groups.

Potrero Hill, I remember had pictures in the restaurants

showing these groups meetings, big banquets, all men. Not a
woman in sight. All big, handlebar moustaches, you know. These
people all spoke Croatian or Polish. So he got this entree, sort
of an official entree, into the government, if I would call it.
So he became political.
 22

In those days, Polish prizefighters, Polish athletes--you

know, baseball; later, football; were prominent. And you would
see all these names, but also you would see the Italian
prizefighters and so on. Also the Jewish prizefighters. Oh,
yes. There were some. But this was a way to move ahead and make
money. Today the blacks, essentially, are using the same
technique .

So don t know where he really got prominent in the

I

political activity, but it was during that period when we were

living at the Benedettis . He was sponsoring, or he was signing
for various candidates, and we would meet various candidates.
Uhl, who was a mayor way back in the thirties, my father
sponsored him. And then later the mayor from North Beach, Rossi,
he sponsored him. They would come to our house. So he had
gotten into a sort of political mode, which kind of also rubbed
off on me in later years.

Larkin Street Apartment House, 1929

Maslach: We then made the big move of life to our final residence, which
was an apartment house on Larkin Street, 556 Larkin Street,
between Turk and Eddy. We purchased the house in 1929. They had
a big mortgage. So paying off that mortgage, twenty-year
mortgage they did pay it off before, in 49, but that was the
thing. My father could walk down to Leighton Industries and do
all those things. So he would pick up separate jobs, and because
of his political contacts he had people, for example, Chauncey
Tramontolo, San Francisco, a well-known judge and politicianhe
lived out there in Pacific Heights. And guess what? He knew my
father was a handyman, so if something went wrong he called up my
father.

Home Education Helping Father

Maslach: Well, at this point, nine years old, I was able to accompany him,
so here became some of the home education which you didn t think
about at the time but did affect me greatly because- -my brother
didn t do this. He was more active in sports and other things.
He was a very good basketball player, first string, Commerce
High. He was All-City soccer team, Commerce High, so he had lots
of things going. And he was essentially able, because he was
number one, to do his thing, you know.
 23

Let me just give you a small example. Let s say a dairy

lunch down there you know, six blocks away called up and there
was a problem. Well, my father kind of knew what to bring in the
way of tools, and we would go down there. I would carry a small
toolbag, and he would carry a big one. And we would get down
there and get to work and start fixing things. But every once in
a while, he did not have a specific tool that he needed, so it
was my job to run back home and get this tool. So I knew the
tools; I knew the tool shop we had. My father had a very good
shop in the basement of the apartment house.

The apartment house had twenty-three apartments, and we

occupied the big one, and the other twenty-two were rented. My
mother ran the house; my father worked.

Swent : You owned this entire building.

Maslach: Yes, we owned it.

Swent: Twenty-two apartments.

Maslach: Yes.

Swent: Big building.

Maslach: Especially in 1929 [chuckles].

Swent: Yes, huge.

Maslach: They had done very well while renting and had enough for the down
payment and so on. But it was kind of tough because--

Swent: The Depression--

Maslach: I spoke right in the beginning that 1--1 11 repeat it now because
I don t know if we recorded it--but I have always thought in my
life that I happened to be in the right place at the right time,
and the right time was during periods when major changes were
occurring. My father and mother came during a great change; you
know, the earthquake and fire. And then 1929 was the Depression.
It was tough, you know. I remember that we were considered in
the Polish community to be well off. There were several names of
families we were compared to, a doctor, a dentist. We were up
in that group. My father moved out of the working-man level.

But remember a few nights over the years that I felt still
I
a little hungry when 1 went to sleep at night. I guess things
were pretty tough in that whole operation. We were in a nice
little community there. I can tell you now that the grammar
 school I went to was John Adams. It was on Eddy Street, between
Polk and Van Ness. The building still exists, but it s being
used for something else in the school district. 1 started there
in the third grade. So it gives you some idea how we moved.

But getting back to the politics aspect of it, because this

1 think was very interesting: I met people because I went with my
father. The Tramontolos and I were friends. I got a block on a
name. That s why I m starting to slow down. But I ll think of
it. One of the families that we worked with later, one of the
men ran for Congress. This was a time when our daughter,
Christina, was quite young. I always remember they took a

picture of the congressman, the man who was running, with

Christina in costume and playing up the Polish connection
[chuckles]. She still has the costume. Her daughters have worn
it, but now they re twenty years old. But this was a long-time
family in San Francisco. The man was in Congress for many years.
He always asked for my father s support. The man was Bill
Mailliard.

My father s support extended beyond that. By the time 1929

came around and we were down on Larkin street, he had already
signed for Al Smith, and we had letters from Herbert Hoover and
Al Smith, asking for support. All kinds of--a good friend, a man
who came to our house, was Senator Johnson. You know, the famous
Hiram Johnson. In fact, I had his nomination for the Naval
Academy if I wanted it.

Swent : Well!

Maslach: That s another story, which I ll tell later. But we were very
political. I mean, what we were doing in those early days there
on Larkin Street--my father was president of a statewide Slavic
organization, so this had large voting clout. So his name really
meant something in that regard.

Swent: Did your mother play any part in this, too?

Maslach: Always in the background, always in the background. She was

always socially there, but never spoke out.

Swent: There were not women s organizations.

Maslach: Oh, no, no. This is a different era. Don t kid yourself! But,
for example, I remember we went down to listen to Paderewski play
in the Civic Auditorium, which is an enormous hall, and after it
was over, we went back to his dressing room, where I met
Paderewski.
 25

Swent: Wonderful!

Maslach: My father and he talked at length, Paderewski being not only a

great musician but also the former president of Poland. We also
met a lot of people through the music aspect. During the period
I m talking about, any way you could move, make money, and the
first person who moved was, of course, Yehudi Menuhin, and he was
down there on McAllister Street, you know. I remember we used to
play basketball in the schoolyard of the John Swett Junior High
School, which is on McAllister--at that time, right on the edge
of the big Jewish community. And I remember Yehudi, who was not
a sportsman or a player as a kid. You know, short pants. We all
wore knickers and short pants. He came and he was there, and it
was obviously his parents with him. He ran and grabbed a ball
and did not really know how to handle a basketball. I don t
think he jammed his finger of his bowing hand, but I later
thought that if he had jammed a finger on his fingering hand, he
would have been in real trouble. So an older person saw that and
screamed and ran over and grabbed him and pulled him out
[laughs]. And from then on, Yehudi was in private schools, and 1
never saw him again. I saw his sister every once in a while,

Hepzibah, who was a very fine pianist, and she has made a career
but nothing like Yehudi. But there were lots of other people.
But his name was essentially the big name. And there was a
period there where I can still remember, Yehudi can do this,
"If

you can do this."

My brother started violin first, and then I started violin.

My sister was on piano [chuckles]. Oh, God! I studied violin
for seven years, and I played in the Minetti Symphony Orchestra,
which was a private orchestra in San Francisco. Private
orchestras are very common in Europe, and this was the equivalent
of a European private orchestra. It was good. Compared to San
Francisco Symphony, which at that time was not good. I mean, we
were second-rate, but so was the San Francisco Symphony, so we
were considered good, a big orchestra.

A Philosophy about the Value of Time

Swent: Did you take private lessons?

Maslach: Oh, yes. Seven years. My brother became better than I. I kind
of lost interest in it. One of the reasons was that when I was

young--! don t know how I figured it out, but I adopted a

philosophy that I should not be spending lots of time on things
which took a lot of time to be good. To be good with the violin,
 26

you truly have to practice four or five hours a day, and you can
only do that with private schools learning, family situations.

This is true also in sports. One of my relatives, sister-

in-law, Ann Curtis, great American swimmer, who held every record
there was for many, many years- -Olympics, three medals. I talked
to her one day a few years ago. I said, "Gee, I m really
impressed. Our grandaughter has made the swimming team in her
high school, and she swims an hour a day." Ann looked at me and
said, be good, you ve got to swim three or four or five
"To

hours." That s true of most anything.

And throughout my life, there were various things that I

did--violin, as an example. But later I played golf for a little
while here, but after I broke 100 and then I realized how much
time you had to put in on it, I quit [chuckles].

Swent : You can t do everything.

Religious Activity and Leaving the Catholic Church

Maslach: The thing also that happened- -when we were in the Benedetti area
and also downtown--was the larger religious activity. Born and
raised in the Catholic church, the first church out there it was
near Divisadero, about a six-block walk from my housewe would
go there. It s a church that just recently was dropped,
deconsecrated. There s just no parish there anymore. Divisadero
and Golden Gate Avenue. Holy Cross.

Then, when we moved downtown, just about four blocks away

was St. Mary s Cathedral, which was then on Van Ness Avenue and
Farrell--large, baroque, brick building. And from Van Ness
Avenue, it was one of the most depressing things to see because
there was literally a hundred steps up the hill to the church.
The reason I mention this is because to this very day, I still
remember coming down those stairs as one of the pallbearers, with
my father s casket. And let me tell you, that was one scary
operation! I just couldn t believe I did it.

But we became active (my mother pushing it) in the Catholic

Sunday school. Of course, you then get involved in the altar boy
operation. We were very straight altar boys, both red and white
altar boys. This was the archbishop s cathedral. So we were
heavily involved. This started, you know, when I was nine years
old. I left the Catholic religion, on my own volition, oh, about
1935, 36.
 27

Swent : You were young.

Maslach: Because I at that point realized that there was a basic dichotomy
with religion and what I was beginning to see as my career, which
was to be in the field of science engineering, something of that
order. I hadn t fixed on it, but I could see everything moving
in that direction. When an Irish cardinal in Boston came out
with a speech in which he ridiculed Einstein, who was coming to
the United States, fleeing Hitler Germany, with the words--!
still remember them--"This man bringing his pagan science."
Well, there is nothing pagan about mathematics and physics and
chemistry. And at this early age in my life, I just heard this.
Fifteen, let s say. I was in Galileo High at the time Galileo
and the Inquisition. The church had not changed. And so I left
the church.

And earlier than that, I started violin, at seven.

Thirteen, f ourteen--seven years, yes. I decided I was not going
to be good, and therefore I should not continue doing it. The
violin was not my first choice.

But these all came from that Depression period, 1929 through
the early thirties. There were so many elements there that I
recognize, still today. For example, I mentioned to you how
ethnic San Francisco was, and still is. It s worth going, for
example, to a Catholic high mass at St. Peter s and Paul s in
North Beach, really, where they put on a show. Not as great a
show as we put on in St. Mary s Cathedral, which was the thing.
But if you want something ethnic, go to that Mexican-American
church on Broadway, just above the tunnel. It s a little church.
I used to go there for midnight mass when I was a teenager.
Christmas. Man! You saw religion! You never saw it in the
formality of the archbishop s cathedral.

Swent: We have had to move to another room, and so there was a little
intermission here.

The last part that we got was where you were talking about
going to the Mission church for a wonderful example of Catholic
panoply, and then you said that you had settled on the Quaker
faith.

Maslach: That was the decision I made many years later. But at that point
in my life that I m speaking about now is between the years when
I was nine years old up to the end of high school, seventeen

years old. But I made decisions to no longer maintain the

 28

violin, and I also made a decision to leave the Catholic church,

which is pretty good for a kid of that age.

Swent: It is! Quite remarkable, 1 think.

Maslach: So was making decisions in an environment that I m trying to

I
explainwas of a different era than we have here today. For
example, during the worst of the Depression years, one of my
chores was to walk to the Langendorf Bakery seconds shop. In
other words, you could get day-old bread, because it was so much
cheaper. The only cakes that we ever had for our birthday or
something like thatyou know, there were very, very few
celebrations during those periods was by buying the day-old
bakery goods. That required hiking, round trip, about a mile and
a half. And if you were going anywhere else, why, those days you
used shoe leather. You didn t even use the trolleys that ran up
and down Larkin Street. We were in -a very good location for
transportation.

So starting in Adams grade school in third grade there, all

of a sudden, lo and behold, you developed a whole new set of
friends. And you had to do this in a downtown location. The man
who became my best friend was a man by the name of Michel
Lafaurie, which is a French-sounding name but he was Basque. His
father was in many respects similar to my father in that he was
the head of the Basque community.

Just to further these comments about how ethnic we were in

those days, Michel s father would take me along with Michel, and
we would have dinner at, say, Des Alpes, a restaurant that still
exists on Broadway Street, between Stockton and Powell. In those
days, Sunday dinner was a dollar less than that. Sunday dinner
was a dollar in about 1940, so Sunday dinner was probably around
sixty, seventy cents, and for that you got two courses, two
entrees, and Sunday you would have chicken and then you would
have a meat course, red meat, that is, as well. But you would
always start out with soup and pasta of some sort, and you would
always end up with dessert and, of course, the wine was part of
the meal.

I remember very good restaurants in North Beach. Lucca s,

for example. Big, large, popular place, in which a dollar meals-
-you ended up with a box of petits fours, which you would take
with you as you left. This was the kind of era that I m talking
about, in which I walked into Des Alpes with Michel s father, who
was a tall, dominating presence, and very quiet, and the owners
of the place would immediately come up to him. It was almost
like watching a film of the Mafia. They would come and bow to
him, shake his hand and so on. And he was the one who settled
 29

disputes within the community. In those days, the Basque

community was right there in that Broadway-Powell area, and the
hotel there. The Basque hotel was further down Broadway, but
there was a Basque hotel right there on the Broadway and Powell.
Still is.

After meals in some of these restaurants, all the sheep

herders that were staying there would just go off in the room and
start playing cards, so you would have this wonderful feeling of
being in a family, you know, right there, so I went from an
Italian family, the Benedettis, to a Basque family, the
Lafauries. Other people that I knew there, people like Freddie
Gomez, who was a short, active, handsome Mexican-American. He
lived right down there in the Tenderloin. He was right there in
the red light district.

You have to remember that Larkin and Eddy were apartment

houses right on the edge of the Tenderloin, and so you walked
through the red light district of San Francisco. The prostitutes
and the pimps were very obvious all around you. This was the
district. And one block away from our apartment house there was
a big hotel, old hotel, and on the ground floor of that hotel was
a gymnasium for the training of boxers, professional boxers. I

would go down--you would just walk in and watch boxers training.

There would be, of course, short fights on the rings there, too.

And if you walked the other way, down Eddy Street, there was
another famous gym that is still in existence, in an old, old
building. It s essentially one of the boxing gymnasiums of San
Francisco. The district was very, very different from the
Mission district of family and community surrounded by Polish
people or McAllister Street with the Benedettis and so on. We
were in the suburbs then, and now we were in the center of the
city.

The Central Library

Maslach: Three blocks away from our house was the central library. That
was sort of a third part of my education. I found out very

quickly, in the children s library roomyou could get the card--

and the maximum number of books you could take out at one time
was four. I would take out four books, and I would go home, and
four days later I was down there. I finished those, and took out
four more.

Swent : What were you reading?

 30

Maslach: Well, in the children s library, of course, you essentially had

: all kinds of children s books like Mother West Wind and so on,
things of this nature, and a lot of other old-fashioned
children s books. But as you got older, you got into the boys
books. You know, the Hardy Boys and Tom Swift and things of that
nature. I remember winning an award- -one summer they had a
summer reading program in which you had to read certain books;
then you had to write book reports. I got an award on one of
those. I ve forgotten whether it was because I read so many
books or whether [chuckles] I wrote a good report. One or the
other.

But I just lived in that library. Not just the children s

room. I quickly found out that you could go upstairs here and
get smart. This is the main library. And I learned about card
catalogues. And I started moving into much more adult type of
reading. And then if you go the next floor up, why, you got into
the periodical rooms. Man, that was really something. Not just
the newspapers but all the magazines. I m talking every magazine
you could possibly think of.

So here you ve got this environment of, let s say, 1932.

Twelve years old. Here you ve got this environment of poverty
and the Depression, and here I am--on one hand the church; I ve
got music; here I ve got the library; here I had other friends.
George Goodrich. His father had a big garage. In those days
there were big garages for keeping cars inside. You just didn t
park in the streets if you had a good car. That garage did work
on cars but also kept cars.

Boy Scouts; Achieving Eagle Rank Very Young

Maslach: So there was a whole new kind of life, a very, very downtown
life. You got into the next phase, which was very important for
me, and that was the Boy Scouts. My brother was in the Boy
Scouts, earlier, of course. So I joined immediately.

Swent : Who sponsored the troop?

Maslach: The troop was sponsored by the downtown Lions Club of San
Francisco. There was a man by the name of George Johnson, who
was our chairman, you know, of the whole operation. He was a
contractor and house builder. He came quite often to meetings.

Before embarking on that, because that whole scouting aspect

was a major part of my life; there was nothing else to do. This
 31

is the point I want to make. You know, summertime is three

months. What do you do as a ten-, twelve-year-old?

Swent: Were you doing any kind of chores around the apartment building?

Maslach: Well, I was working with my father, but during the day my father
was having his regular job and it was only in the evenings that I
would be going out with him. And yes, as I became older, I got
into more technical chores. The first chore I had was to take
the elevator up to the top floor and go down the back stairs,
where people used a garbage chute down to the garbage can- -but
people would leave papers and magazines and things that would be
gathered and taken down. Bottles, for example. So that was one
of my chores. I would go down and I would wrap up and package
the newspapers and the magazines and what have you, and would
sell them to the rags-bottles-sacks man. Yes, we all had chores.

As I grew older, as I said, the scouting experience became a

very dominant factor. I had not yet given up the violin but I
soon did. I just moved extremely rapidly. I became a tenderfoot
scout the first meeting, passed those tests. A month or so later
1 was a second-class scout, and about three months later I was a
first-class scout, and could start on my merit badges.

Well, I won t bore you with a long story, but when I

finished scouting, the merit badge part of it, I had sixty-one
merit badges out of about ninety-nine available.

Swent: My!

Maslach: Twenty-one were required for this Eagle Scout badge, and I had
those. Some of those were required badges, and some elective.
And I received my Eagle Scout badge from Lord Baden-Powell, the
man who started the Boy Scout movement.

Swent: Oh, really!

Maslach: He happened to be through San Francisco when we had one of our

big jamborees, so--

Swent : So you were an Eagle very young, then.

Maslach: Oh, very young, yes.

Swent: That s remarkable.

Maslach: I just kept up with all sorts of things. One of the other things
of the downtown living that was so wonderful was that about five
blocks to the north was the Lurline Baths. This was a big
 32

swimming pool. Of course, the upper floors, they had bathtubs

and so 0:1. You could go in and bathe and shave and stuff like
that. But the big pool took its salt water from out in the
beach, around Sutro, and pumped the water into downtown San
Francisco. A lot of clubs still have those that pipeline is
still used by the Olympic Club, the Metropolitan Club for women,
and on and on.

Swent : I didn t know that.

Maslach: Oh, yes. So at that point, when I went to Adams school, I began
to learn something about money. Finance. To give you an idea:
Twenty-five cents would put you into any second-class motion
picture theater. If you weren t going to the Fox or Orpheum or
Paramount, twenty-five cents would get you in, and those were
double bills and so on. Twenty-five cents became kind of a goal.
That was a standard for me. As time, went on, as I told you,
fifty cents was a good meal; seventy-five cents was a very good
meal, and so on. Later, one dollar, when I was in high school.

began to understand money, finance, and so on. One of the

I

things I would do would be every once in a while my mother,

being rushed in work, she would give me twenty- five cents for
buying school lunch in the school. Well, guess what? I went
swimming! I did not have lunch [chuckles]. I became a very good
swimmer at a very early age. And I continued with that. In
American Red Cross I took the senior lifesaving certificate and
then the senior first-aid certificate.

Swent: And you did this at the Lurline?

Maslach: Well, I did that at the Lurline and later at the Sutro. But the
Red Cross thing was also downtown. My first-aid classes were
downtown. We really learned, outside of the school, all these
things. The scouting thing was the biggest part. I never went
to a Scout camp as a young Boy Scout, paying to go to the camp,
never. We didn t have that money, that kind of money.

Swent: Have you continued with scouting as an adult?

Maslach: Oh, no. Actually, it s a long story. It will come out.

Swent: All right. Okay.

Maslach: I m just trying to pace myself [chuckles]. The Scout activity

was very, very much a part of not only the social life but also
the private family life. As I said, my brother and I were close
in the sense of doing things. While he was four years ahead and
therefore we did not talk about schoolwork so much, we did a lot
 33

of things. Hiking was one of our best. Many a weekend we would

pack up and go off on Friday afternoon and hike all of Marin
County, Saturday, Sunday, and come back Sunday afternoon.

Swent: How did you get over there?

Maslach: Getting over to Marin County was one of the greatest, most
wonderful experiences of the day. You would take the trolley
down to the Ferry Building. As you went racing down Market
Street, you would come to the Ferry Building, and there was a big
circle where the cars would stop in front of the Ferry Building.
You have to remember: two tracks down, two big circles, and then
two tracks out. The thing to do, if you were just doing a
daytime trip and this was the most dramaticwas to go Sunday
morning and the eight o clock ferry to Sausalito was the ferry
you got on. That ferry was big. No automobiles. Just foot
passengers .

Swent: Do you remember how much it cost?

Maslach: Oh, yes. About two bits, twenty-five cents. That ferry was
jammed. mean, I m talking not just a hundred.
I I m talking a
thousand. We had the German-American Society with Germans,
Tyroleans, leather pants, everything, the whole thing. We had
the Italian-American Society. In fact, both of them had houses,
big houses, up on the slopes of Mount Tamalpais. They have
merged, because of the war situation and only one club is left,
the Alpine Club.

But hiking on Mount Tamalpais, Marin County, was very, very

popular. I remember in 29 my godf ather--Stanley--lived in
Alameda--took me on vacation with his son, who was my age, and we
went up to Russian River for a week. His name was Witkowski,
Stanley Witkowski. He was deputy district attorney, and he
served under Earl Warren, who was the district attorney of
Alameda County. They were a wonderful branch of our family.
Stanley s wife was just a beautiful woman, and he was a striking
young man. He later Americanized his name and changed it to
Whitney, Stanley Whitney. He ran for the district attorney s
office and won, so when Warren went to the governorship, Whitney
became the district attorney in Alameda.

And on that particular weekend, as we were driving down back

from Russian River in 1929, all you could see was smoke. The sky
was just filled with smoke. Tamalpais Mountain was on fire.
Everything just burned. Just destroyed the train that used to go
up to the top of Mount Tamalpais, the curviest train in the world
and so on. And just miles and miles of Tamalpais was burned.
 So we came down. Of course, we were worried at that point,
so instead of going, down and taking the ferry to San Francisco
and another ferry to Alameda, which is the normal thing to do,
why, I remember Stan saying, "Hey, we re going to go the other
way." So we went from Petaluma over to Vallejo and then took the
bridge from Vallejo and came down that way. And all the time we
would watch the fire. It was a really monumental- -this was not a
fire that burned a lot of houses because there were not that many
houses, but that whole side of Mount Tamalpais that faces San
Francisco was reduced to scrub. Very, very sad.

So hiking and Boy Scouting became a dominant facet of my

life in those days, simply because there was nothing else to do,
and I tended to be more of a reader and student. I was very good
at basketball, fairly good at baseball. Those activities require
you to make up a team, and downtown schools were not noted for a
lot of playgrounds. You did not have a lot of people.

I mentioned earlier that there were gangs in San Francisco.

There always were. There was a big sports tradition in San
Francisco. When 1 was living in the Mission and then later in
downtown San Francisco, we had three professional baseball teams
in San Francisco. We didn t just have the Seals. They were the
best. They were the Triple A league. But we had the Missions
down in the Mission District. And then we had another team that
played out there near Lone Mountain because there was a big field
right near the Benedettis, and that was used not only for
baseball but later for football.

Lone Mountain was sticking up there with a mile around it

which were empty lots and cemeteries. Then they moved the
cemeteries. But there were all kinds of sports activities.
Basketball was just beginning, really. I used to go to the Hayes
Valley Center, which was an old church which had been converted
into a community center. Well, the Hayes Valley gang that was
their hangout. They dominated. The Hayes Valley gang is still
in existence today.

Not too many years ago, there was an article in the

newspaper in which they had a rumble with one of the other gangs
down in the Civic Center. One dead and three in the hospital.
This was a turf war. Just like, you know, the West Side Story,
[chuckles]. This was the way it was. There were quite a few
gangs in the Mission District.

Swent : Were there drugs?

Maslach: All these were kid gangs, young, youth gangs. And the gangs were
essentially--
 35

Swent : Male dominance?

Maslach: Oh, yes! Macho, very macho. Very male dominant. "This is our
turf, and you stay out of here." You have to remember it was a
poor time, and if you had a basketball court, you didn t want
anybody else in, from some other outside place, coming in and
playing basketball.

Swent : What sort of weapons did they use?

Maslach: Knives, guns. When I was in junior high school, a young man,
obviously older than the rest of us in junior high school, by the
nickname of Spannie--he was a Spanish--Mexican-American or
Latino--we couldn t tell. He did not look Mexican-American. He
looked much more Spanish-Latino. He was an outstanding soccer
player, you know, from a soccer background. And also, in this
school was a big popular person who was also a very good soccer
player but defensive. His name was Nelson. A big, husky
Norwegian.

Well, they obviously had a run-in on the field, but they

were also members of different gangs. Spannie, who was quite
small, ended up knifing Nelson and putting him in the hospital.
Nelson was a big man, but he couldn t deal with that knife. And
that was in junior high school. Those were junior high kids
doing this.

Swent : It isn t anything new, then.

Maslach: Oh, nothing new. But, you see, then it was much more personal.
I mean, there were fights in the alley half a block away from the
junior high school. I was involved in one fight, but 1 was smart

enough to know things about fighting, and so I got in my first

punch and I put that guy on the ground. And that was it. No one
ever challenged me again in my life. My brother s reputation
ahead of me was that he was the big sports guy and very strong,
and no one challenged him. He was good. So I came in on his
coat tails in certain respects. This happened everywhere. When
I went to high school and junior high, everybody would say, "Oh,
I remember your sister." remember your brother." And I would
"I

always have to say, "Yes, yes." [laughs]

Swent : Now this is John Swett Junior High.

Maslach: John Swett Junior High. That is on McAllister Street between

Franklin and Gough.
 36

Maslach: I m in the junior high school by this tine, becoming a bit more
adult. You re past the twelve-year-old period, you know. You re
beginning to be in gangs, and you re in the Boy Scouts. Things
are moving into a whole new kind of development.

Swent: Which high school did you go to?

Maslach: Galileo.

Swent: Was this a four-year high school?

Maslach: No. Three years high school.

Swent: Three years junior high?

Maslach: Three-year junior high: seventh, eighth, ninth, then tenth,

eleventh, twelfth. In those days in San Francisco there were
very few high schools because, as I said, the city had not built
up. Lowell High School was the academic high school--still is--
near the Golden Gate Park Panhandle, Masonic Avenue.

The next high school was Polytechnic, which was over in the
Sunset, near where Kezar Stadium was, just at the beginning of
the park, in the Sunset area. And, by its name, it was shops.
This was essentially a shop high school.

The third high school was Commerce. It was downtown, right

near the Civic Center, and, as its name implies, this was for
people who were going into commercial activities: offices and so
on. This was the closest high school to where we lived.

The fourth high school was Galileo. It was the science high
school. It, of course, is up there in North Beach, on Van Ness
Avenue and Bay Street. That s where I went eventually.

But in the junior high schools, there were more of them, and
John Swett was the closest one. As I said, about a six blocks
walk from our house, at Larkin and Eddy. I m trying to give you
the knowledge of how you grow up in this urban environment, which
was a small urban environment but very intense. I mean, I don t
want to harp on problems of prostitution, but it was part of our
life right there. And drinking. Downtown. The various bars and
so on. But this was just very common. Of course, I had seen
some of this since the Polish House bar and so on, things of that
nature.

Getting back to the Polish House, for example, dropping back

one notch, but I would go with my father and mother and I would
run the coatcheck stand. You know, a nickel to check your coat.
 37

I got to keep that amount of money, so this, as I said, became my

financial era [chuckles].

Swent : Did your parents have liquor in their home?

Maslach: Very little. My father and mother were not drinkers. We drank
wine with meals back with the Benedettis, and that was a bit of a
thing that hung on. For example, just one block from our house
on Larkin Street, our apartment house, was the headquarters of
the Italian Swiss Colony Wine Company, which was big in those
days. I would take a gallon jug, washed out, you know, down
there, one block, and hand it to them. Put down twenty-five
cents, and for twenty-five cents you got a gallon of wine. And
it was not bad. It was not great. You know, in those days we
would call things Dago red and stuff like that. But, you know,
there was an awful lot of Zinfandel grapes and not Cabernet, but
it was wine for the house, the table wine of Europe, and you had
it with meals.

So way back, when I was very young, five years level, why,
you would have the wine watered, but even I was always big for my
age, so even when I was going out with Michel and his father to
Des Alpes, why, they would put wine in front of me. So if I can
bounce around this way, if you don t mind--

Swent :
No, not at all.

Maslach: I was just going to point out that in the Des Alpes is a very
interesting story that--it was run by a family, Basque family.
The woman s name was Frankie; the man s name was Johnny.

Frankie and Johnny [chuckles] were lovers. They came from

the Basque area in Europe, and they had children, and they had
relatives, and they ran the place. Maiden aunts and then there
was an uncle somewhere- -Frankie was at the cash register, and
Johnny was the maitre d . Years later, when I was in college, I
would go in there. I d walk in. Frankie would just rush out and
grab me and kiss me. Johnny would wave! I would always sit at a

big table with Johnny. All the bachelors, essentially, had the
big table. There were no chairs; there were benches. And family
style. A big soup bowl and a big plate and a salad plate and a
glass, with a napkin and silverware would be put in front of you,
and the glass was used for water; it was used for wine; it was
used for coffee. Standard French glass. Heavy. Heavy glass.
So I can remember going there for many years. We were greeted by
them. They knew me, and they of course knew Michel and his
father.
 38

There was a Basque place, restaurant, right across the

street. No longer there because there s a Chinese housing
development there. And there was a Basque place up at the corner
at the hotel, the Hotel Uberoi. And then there was a Basque
place which is behind Finocchio s, on Broadway, if you know where
that is, Broadway near Kearny. So there s quite a few Basque
restaurants in those days. But the Des Alpes is the one that s
still around.

But the point 1 guess I m making in all these different

threads of my life coming together here they sort of came
together from twelve years on. Twelve years. I had good
schooling in my grade school.

Swent : I was going to ask if you were a good student?

Maslach: I was always a good student. Studying came very easy for me.
But the first two grades and the school out there on Golden Gate
Avenue, and then in the John Adams School, third through the
sixth grade. No problems. I was always one of the better
scholars in the class. My problem always was that I wasnot
hyperactive but I would get bored, so I would talk. The teacher
would call you a chatterbox. I never was sent to the principal s
office or disciplined or anything like that.

The principal of Adams School was a big woman by the name of

Vogelsang, "birdsong," German.

Swent: Miss, no doubt.

Maslach: Miss. With skirts right to the floor, you know. She was a real
tough disciplinarian. She ran that place with an iron German
hand. But I remember, a third grade teacher, I got along very
well. Fourth grade and so on. I had no problems. In the fifth
and sixth grade, just as, as I m saying, I m getting to the year
twelve, you know, my reading was a dominant, dominant thing. I
don t know why. They had in a classroom a bookcase: about three
shelves, about five feet long, so about fifteen lineal feet of
books. Well, a whole bunch of them were beneath me. I had read
them and so on, and so I remember in the sixth grade I had read
every book that wasyou know. And there was one book left, a
big one. I looked at it and picked it up. Les Miserables. Jean
Valjean. I read that in the sixth grade, eleven years old!

Swent: That s amazing.

Maslach: So I was reading far beyond my years. And the main library, in
the eleventh grade, I was upstairs in the catalogs and taking out
books on exploration, and I was reading geography heavy. I was
 39

reading history heavy, very heavy. I later got into biographies,

but that was more like fourteen or so. And the librarian would
always feed me stuff, you know? I remember many a times I d walk
in and leave the four books to be checked in, and "Oh, but
George! "--and then she would reach back and there was a new book
that had come in and hadn t even been out yet, but they saved it
for me. And you would read this. So I was getting a lot of
instruction from librarians in the San Francisco library.

I remember upstairs in the card catalog area there was one

especially that I would go to, and I would wait to see when she
was at the long barrier between us and the stackswe re now
talking about a barrier that was about seventy feet long, and
they would come in with the books. You would give them your
card, and you would make out the card for the book you want. But
this one woman, she really knew what I liked, so I would put a
card down on andlet s say, I d be reading about the original
Hillary and others, the original climbers on Mount Everest.
Well, she would go there and if that book was not there, or if
there was another book that caught her eye, she would bring it
along as well. "Try this." So she was feeding me stuff. I
learned more about Everest and India, Tibet [laughs]. It was a
great life.

The point was you had your house, which was not a house; it
was an apartment. My sister, my brother and I slept in the same
room until we were in high school. The living room was in part
the office for the apartment house. We had the kitchen and
dining area. That s where the table good lighting you would
sit and read. Sometimes in the front room, too, but you did not
have a rural life. You had a very urban apartment life.

Swent :
Cosmopolitan.

Maslach: Oh, yes. And I would sub for guys selling newspapers on the
corners. I would run errands for the pharmacist who was on the
corner. I would deliver drugs to apartment houses all around.
And there was a smoke shop on the other corner there at Eddy and
Larkin, and there was the most beautiful older woman, who was the
cashier and ran the thing. They had a gaming operation in the
back room, which was illegal. They had card games going in the
back room. I remember the first time she asked me if I knew the
French laundry about two and a half blocks down, and I said,
She said she had a blouse that she wanted to get, so she
"Yes."

gave me money to go down and pick up the blouse and come back.

Swent: What sort of people rented your apartments, in your building?

Maslach: The rents in those early days were around twenty to twenty-five
dollars.

Swent : A month.

Maslach: A month. Almost all of them, a large percentage, let s say--a

large percentage of them were commercial and/or government types.
Women that is, office personnel, working, of the State Department
building. It was on McAllister Street and the Civic Center. Or
at City Hall. So we had quite a number there. Or the shop
keepers. I remember one guy that owned a liquor store lived
there. He was just down the street. They worked close, within
walking distance. No one had an automobile, nobody. So it was
all people nearby. We had one woman who was the principal of a
special school for retarded and/or disabled children.

Swent: They were adults, not many children.

Maslach: There were no children. The apartments were one bedrooms, so

that did not lend itself to children. We were the only children.
So we were in an adult environment immediately.

I just did all kinds of--you mentioned chores around the

house. What happened was that during that period twelve and
older or even ten and older--! would help my father. Well, very
quickly I learned how to replace a light switch or do electrical
work. I did replace washers--

Swent: No wonder your marriage has lasted so long! [laughs]

Maslach: I do everything in a house, all painting, all floors, all

windows, all everything else. You name it. So I got to do these
things, and after a while, of course, my mother would say, "Look,
we ve got an apartment up here that s burned out the switch." So
I would get the tools and go up with her.

We had nurses there. I remember there were two nurses at

one time. I remember their white uniforms. There were hospitals
nearby, downtown, St. Francis up on the hill. So there was a lot
of that. Schoolteachers, that type.

It was transient. Some people stayed a long, long time.

But I would say half of the apartments, long time; other half of
the apartments, short time. I m talking six months, a year,
short time.

The biggest thing besides that rapid growth of Boy Scout

activities was when I went to junior high school, I used to
always take a shop class. I liked shop work. You were required
 to take shop in those days. So the first year, first semester,
there was a wood shop, and the second semester it was a metal
shop, a sheet metal shop, and then after that you could choose,
but there was machine shop. Well, I did well in the wood shop; I
did well in the sheet metal shop. I liked it and did all the
things. I found, years later, that my son was making the same

things in sheet metal shop that 1 did. Oh, sugar scoops and

[tape interruption]

Maslach: But I met schoolteachers there who accepted me in a morenot a

peer role, but as a colleague. For example, my seventh grade
home school teacher was a man (which was rare in those days), but
he taught social sciences and he had worked in the police
department for a long time. There was a woman in seventh or
eighth grade who was

Swent : Do you remember their names?

Maslach: No. The man, incidentally, remembered me. Heyears later, when
he was working down at central administration, and when I became
dean of engineering it was in the newspaper, and he called me up.

Swent : How nice.

Maslach: That s a long time later!

Swent: Yes.

Maslach: And so but there was a woman there. She was really a beautiful,
tall woman. Very distinctively modern. Everybody knew she was
married, and therefore she was illegal. A woman could not be a
schoolteacher if she were married. That was two jobs in the same
family. No way. But she was.

And then the man that I met was the machine shop teacher,
Bill Andrews, who became in essence a father surrogate, one of
many. He was building a boat, a small power boat, and I helped
him with that power boat, and then for years later, why, he and I
just fished and boated, you know, went up the Delta and the
river. His wife was a beautiful woman. Looked very much like
Myrna Loy. He was disabled. He had a leg with a big brace,
paralyzed as a youth. He was a real character. He had been a
professional boxer and fireman. You know, all these things. We
were lifelong friends. I stayed with him, visited him even when
1 came back and I was dean.

Swent: Was your Scoutmaster a person you were close to?

Maslach: No. We went through a whole bunch of different Scoutmasters.

Swent : Where did you meet?

Maslach: In the Adams School, at the beginning.

Swent: In the school.

Maslach: Yes. Later, down at Junior High School. But the father
surrogate that I met and developed there was a man by the name of
Vic Sharp, who was the associate head of scouting in San
Francisco. For years he and I worked together in developing
Scout camps, repairing them, and developing new ones in the
Sierras. He introduced me to the Sierras. I think it hit me at
a kind of a break point because age twelve on gets into heavy
scouting and gets into yachting a lot, boating. And it s kind of
a turning point.

Frances Eberhart

[Interview 2: August 27, 1998]

Swent: At our last meeting, you spoke of Frances Eberhart s death, and
we didn t follow up and say what the significance of that was. I
think we had better put that in here.

Maslach: Frances Eberhart was a dominant figure in the College of

Engineering for many, many years. When I first met her, I was a
student and I was a research assistant working for Mike
[Morrough] O Brien, who was not yet dean, and Richard Folsom,
Professor in Mechanical Engineering. When I received my first
paycheck from the University in 1941, it was given to me by
Frances Eberhart. With her in the Mechanical Engineering office
was Vi Lane, who later moved over into the undergraduate student
office and became another very dominant figure in the College of
Engineering over the years.

During the war, a lot of people on the faculty and also

among the staff moved up the hill. Worked at the Radiation
Laboratory because they were in need of people. When I
graduated, the population of students had just diminished
enormously, so there was no work on campus. Many staf f--Frances
Eberhart, I know, went to work at the Radiation Laboratory. Her
name at that time, her first marriage, was Frances Woertendyke.
She was a tall woman and a dominant person. She had an
interesting sense of humor. She had a great laugh, which was
 43

kind of a male laugh, and very loud, and she would just laugh and
everybody else, of course, would laugh with her. She became the
administrative assistant for Mike O Brien during the war period
and after the warafter the war ended, I should say. So she was
with the College of Engineering in an administrative position all
the way back to the big, big change which occurred immediately
after the war, when the College of Engineering went from four
hundred students the last year of the war to four thousand
students the next year. They were running classes Saturdays,
Sundays Sunday afternoon, that is. They were running
laboratories evenings, and they were just struggling to get
people to come and teach. So that was a very hectic time.

She continued as the administrative assistant for John

Whinnery and then, for the first few months, with me. My style
of administration, which I ll get into at the proper time, I
discussed with her. She had another job that she had her eyes
on. It was a job at systemwide. It was engineering liaison
committee work and all other systerawide engineering work. She
was just perfect for the job. So after finding a new assistant
for me, she went to systemwide.

Swent : We had better explain what "systemwide" means.

Maslach: Systemwide is our shorthand for the president s office, which has
administrative overview of the entire University of California
system, which consists of nine campuses, of which Berkeley is
one. Los Angeles another, and so on.

Swent: And the offices are also here in Berkeley.

Maslach: It s in Oakland.

Swent: Well, yes, Oakland now.

Maslach: We have a brand new building in downtown Oakland, which I have

yet to visit. I have known many of the presidents, and this one,

Atkinson, was especially well known to me because when he was at

Stanford University he and our daughter Christina, who is now a
professor here at Berkeley, knew each other. She took courses
from him, and he was considering being her thesis advisor. Now,
you know, many years later, he goes around bragging about her,
about he was her advisor. Well, he really was not! But that s
the way he remembers her. [chuckles] So, with my joking
references of the three stages of life, first you re known as the
son or daughter of parents; then you re known on your own; and
then at the end you re known as the father or mother of --artist
son, or professor daughter.
 44

Swent: But that s -;ery gratifying. Well, that was one thing that I
wanted to follow up.

Maslach: We ll be getting back to Frances Eberhart time and again, as we

get along.

Swent: That name crops up in everybody s recollections.

Maslach: Her second marriage was to Howard Eberhart, who was a civil
engineering professor, and he retired, and a few years later she
retired. They moved down to Santa Barbara, where he continued to
teach for many years. I was surprised how long he was teaching.

Swent: When we stopped last time you had been talking about John Swett
Junior High and you had spoken some about high school, but I
think that there was more that you wanted to say.

Maslach: Yes, we were wandering around.

Clothes for Work and School

Swent: That s the way conversations go. I don t believe we talked at

all about clothes.

Maslach: About what?

Swent :
Clothes, what you wore to school,

Maslach :
[laughs]

Swent : And what your father wore to work, and so on. You mentioned that
your mother made a lot of your clothes.

Maslach: My mother made a lot of our clothes when we were very young. By
that, I mean in grade school. But come junior high and high
school, we purchased clothes. My family always dressed well. My
mother, with her background making clothes, she made sure that we
looked up-to-date. She refused to let us wear jeans, for
example, to school. We wore corduroys, which was a pretty
popular material in those days. But as we got into high school
and so on, it was slacks and sweaters.

Swent: What kind of shoes did you wear?

Maslach : I always had a memory of going to get shoes because my shoe size
now is ten and a half, but it s wide, so when I went to a shoe
 store, in those days they had those f luoroscopes , in which you
could look at your feet within the shoe. We d go in there and
finally find a pair of shoes that fit right, and I remember
looking in the fluoroscope and seeing my bones in my toes and so
on [chuckles). It s a relative of the concept of X-rays. Again,
my mother did not care for us ever to wear tennis shoes,
"tennies," which were very popular in those days, mainly because
tennies just smelled up your socks something horrible.

We were well groomed. I mean, my mother made sure that we

looked well. She was in the house, apartment house all that
time, my age nine on, 1929 on. She was always well dressed--!
never saw her in anything but dresses. She was--I remember the
quiet personality, excellent as a manager of the apartment house.
We did a lot of work together as I grew older. It was an
interesting life.

What I was trying to do at the end of the last session was

to kind of move from one era to another era. Up until age nine,
we were living down there in the Mission and then we were living
out in the McAllister Street area, near Lone Mountain. Those
were sort of the boondocks of San Francisco. As I said, there
were acres of land just outside of our house in the Mission
District, and they had the Barnum and Bailey Circus, whereas the
other way we were up there next to cemeteries, which were then
moved while we were sort of in existence there, to make more land
available for housing. So we were really on the edge of then
what was San Francisco downtown area.

The new era really began when I was nine. Never really
flourished until I became twelve, more or less, because you had
to grow larger and [chuckles] in grammar school, you did not have
the opportunities that you have when you move on to junior high
and high school. The whole social fabric changed. The thing I m
trying to emphasize is how living in downtown San Francisco, that
was a very, very exciting thing. I just was able to take

advantage of it without knowing what I was doing. I mean, this

was certainly nothing that--

Swent : You mentioned the library, what an influence that was.

Maslach: Yes, I started going to the library right away when I was nine.
We had empty lots nearby, and we played ball in various places.
And the playground, the Swett playground, was about four blocks
away. But we didn t go much there when we were in grammar
school; we tended to hang out on our side of Van Ness Avenue,
rather than go to the other side.
 46

I can remember, for example, on Van Ness Avenue, where the

opera house and veteraas memorial building is--Van Ness Avenue
between McAllister and Hayes--and that was a big fenced-off area
there. We would sneak around the fence in some way or another,
and the whole area was just sand dunes. But what was remarkable
was there was an artesian well system in downtown San Francisco,
with water coming right out of the ground, in large amounts. I m
talking a pipe the equivalent, say, of six-inch diameter flowing
quite full.

Swent : These were wells that were tapped?

Maslach: They had been originally tapped when the city was young, but when
the water system which was piped throughout the city came into
being, these artesian wells were not used. In fact, on the other
side of the Civic Center, down next to the library, was another
big area near the building which is now the federal building.
That was all the same thing: sand dunes and water. So you think
about--

Swent : It s amazing.

Maslach: --what I m saying, you know. Here, 1930--let s say we re 1990--

sixty years ago, right in the center of the city, next to the
City Hall, were blocks and blocks of sand dunes with water, and
we used to go down there and play. We would of course get chased
out by somebody, but it was quite a time. In those days, if you
went out into the Sunset District, there was no housing beyond
about, oh, 15th Avenue, 19th Avenue. All the way from 19th to
48th was just sand dunes, and I mean miles of sand dunes. To a
much lesser extent on Richmond, north side of San Francisco s
Golden Gate Park. But it was country in that regard.

The Library and Reading

Maslach: The use of the library I think was my first kind of big break
into the modern something else. I truly enjoyed that library,
and I made use of it. I still have great memories of the grand
staircase that goes up to the second floor. The children s
library was on the first floor, down on the south side. I always
recall vividly the statue and the plaque there to Carnegie,
Andrew Carnegie, who gave a large amount of money for the
library. That was part of his giving money to the people.

I developed a technique of reading which was essentially, I

guess, what they call speed reading; I read so much. For

 47

example, I just finished a novel in two or three days. I read

the last novel written by Dorothy Sayers, the great mystery
writer in England. She finished it up to about the three-quarter
point, and then got busy doing other things that she liked
better. She left instructions on how to finish it, in outlining
and everything. The foundation found someone who wrote mysteries
in her style and she, this other woman, finished it up. It was
kind of interesting to look and hear, listen to the same Dorothy
Sayers that-- [chuckles]

Swent : What s the name of this last book? I can t remember. I know I
read a review of it.

Maslach: Thrones and Foundations. Right now, the book I m reading is one
by Saylor, Steven Saylor, a Berkeley resident, who writes novels
which are based upon ancient Rome. He has a very, very good
knowledge of the history of the time, and he pulls in history, so
you have Cicero and Mark Anthony and others involved in a novel.
I find I m reading much more fiction than I used to. But in the
early years, when I was young, I read very little fiction. I was
enormously dedicated to history, biographies, things of that
nature .

Swent : Adventure stories perhaps?

Maslach : No.

Swent : Adventure travel kind of thing?

Maslach: Yes. For example, I remember reading everything about Leigh and
Mallory on Mount Everest. I ve got a fascination with mountains,
and Mount Everest especially. So I read in that area very, very
heavily. And I did a little more reading maybe in sea
exploration, geography, because I ve always been involved with
the bay and the ocean and so on.

The Great Depression

Swent: I m thinking, of course, of trends that continued in your life,

and obviously reading has continued to be important to you.

Maslach: One of the things I want to emphasize is that while it is quite

true that I grew up immediately following the great crash and
therefore the Great Depression, which in essence did not finish
until 1939, ten yearsnine years old to nineteen years old--
that s a very, very important period in your life.
Swent : It is.

Maslach: And I could seebecause I saw it in other young peoplehow you

could wallow in your self-pity and so on, or you could just
strike out and do things on your own. There were no gyms; there
were no recreation centers. They had one man overseeing the
playground area. You know, he was just overwhelmed- -you would
pick up basketball games and so on.

So the second phase I was referring to in that period was to

get involved in the Boy Scouts. My brother, four years ahead of
me, and myself. So we formed a good team, and we went on both
went to the highest levels: Eagle Scout with many merit badges.
And then later, when they started the Sea Scouts ship, the
quartermaster scout was the highest you could get in, the Sea
Scouts. But we were just heavily involved in the activities.
Myself especially. My brother was moTe active in sports
activities, being on a championship basketball team in Commerce
High. He was not on the varsity; he was on the 130s. That s a
junior varsity. Younger, smaller people. One thirty is the
number of points that had to be less than. That was the limit.
It involved height, age, and weight; and it was the league for
smaller players. But he was on the All-State soccer team,
varsity, and a very young, active athlete. Always was a good
student, too, as well.

Swent: You had mentioned your scouting and Vic Sharp.

The Blackhawk and Jazz

Maslach: Yes, that comes out a little later. I ll get into that in just a
little bit, as I move along. But there was a third activity
which I m nostalgically very proud of, that I got involved in,
again on my own initiative. I used to walk past Turk Street, and
I would walk past a place on the corner of Hyde and Turk. It was
called the Blackhawk. You know, when you re ten, twelve years
old, you don t know about nightclubs or jazz joints.

Swent: Your parents weren t frequenting them.

Maslach: No, no. We were still in the period of my playing the violin
doing classical music, which I enjoyed. Oh, I was about twelve,
and, as I say, I was tall for my age, and I just kind of was

looking around. Obviously, it was a drinking establishment of

some sort. You could smell beer, very prominently in there. It
had to be after twelve because Prohibition ended when Roosevelt
 49

came in. So I remember some man who probably was just a janitor
there. Asked me what I was doing and so on. I said, m just
"I

checking out what this place is. 1 just live around the corner."
It s only two blocks, less than two blocks from my house.

So he flipped on a light. They had one big light, you know,

on top of the stage. There was a place for a band or a group to
be playing, and there was lots of chairs and tables. Now, many
people will tell you that they have been to the Blackhawk, but I
have found over the years that most of them never were because I
would ask them a very simple question. I would say, "Where did
you sit when you were in the Blackhawk?" And they would claim
they were under age. Oh, they would say, was at some table or
"I

something
"

And I knew right then that they had never been inside of the
Blackhawk because prominent on one side, in the rear, away from
the door, was an area which was quite strange. It s a small
area, the size of this room, a little smaller than that,
actually. Narrower. But what made it strange was that on three
sides there was chicken wire. You know what chicken wire is?

Swent: Yes.

Maslach: Chicken wire, octagonal, about the size of a golf ball, openings.
And this area was for under-age people. And it was called by
everybody "the Chicken Coop." So if a guy or woman says to you,
"Oh, I know the Blackhawk. I ve been going since I was a kid and

sitting in the Chicken Coop," you knew that they were there.

They knew the name, they knew the chicken wire, they knew
everything. You could get soft drinks there, but you could not
get, of course, any beer or liquor or anything like that.

Swent: And it was actually separated by this chicken wire.

Maslach: Just a little section. Just think of that. Now, this was in the
thirties. What forward-thinking people they were to have a place
for youngsters, young people, just to hear jazz. The Blackhawk
in the thirties was the premier jazz joint on the Pacific Coast.
Everybody came there. It wasn t really that large, but it had
good acoustics. It s an empty lot now. It was beautiful. If
you ever have a chance to get a copy of Ralph Gleason s book on
San Francisco jazz in the thirties and fortieshe was a great
jazz critic for the Chronicle .His statements were so focused--
his articles his statements on jazz at that time are just
fabulous .

So I used to go there from about age twelve on, all the

time. Of course, everybody would recognize me after a while as
 50

someone in the neighborhood, so I soon could go and sit down

outside of the coop. The drinks were, of course, Coke, which was
in the little bottle. But the other drinks--if you wanted
something quite sweet, they had something called Delaware Punch,
which was really sickeningly sweet. They had the Nehi beverages,
--an orange crush and things like that. You could get ginger ale
and so on, but we did not have all of the drinks that are now
available. You know, all of the soft drinks available today. So
this was my beginnings into jazz. I heard many, many of the top
people of jazz.

Swent : Were there blacks as well as whites?

Maslach: Yes. In fact, I wasn t aware of the colored problem, especially

jazz, when I was young, but of course you rapidly find this out
because after a while, more than half the performers are black.
And you look around your population and there s not a single
black in San Francisco downtown. I never saw one. Blacks did
not become part of the Bay Area until World War II, and Henry
Kaiser brought populations from back East, to work in the
shipyards. And I find that an interesting commentary because my
father said that he came from Chicago to San Francisco on the
train, free transportation, because we were going to San
Francisco after the earthquake and fire, so it was exactly the
same procedure that Kaiser used many, many years later. It s the
way the West was won.

Swent: That s right.

Maslach: Those were kind of the three movements: the library, Boy Scouts,
and jazz.

The Sea Scouts

Swent: Mechanics didn t come in particularly?

Maslach: Well, not at twelve. And the mechanical concepts and what I was
interested in doing did not really start booming until, oh, the
age fifteen, sixteen. I m in high school at that point, and we
have kind of finished the Boy Scout period. At that point, when
I studied naval architecture by using library books, we received
a life boat from one of the shipping companies, which was a tubby
kind of a boat. It was ours to do what we wanted--

Swent : This is the Sea Scouts.

 51

Maslach: Sea Scouts. We fixed it up, and I designed the sails, the keel,
the rudder, which are the key items, and we built a ketch-rig
sailboat which was fast. It became the model for conversion of
life boats thereafter in the Sea Scouts. We never lost a race.
You know, this is sort of moving into the Sea Scout area, before
I can be talking about the mountains and the Boy Scout area. But
there is one very interesting point because I think it kind of
illustrates the way I acted. Here we got the boat. 1 was
sixteen years old. I had been reading all about naval
architecture and design of rigs and so on, keels if it s a
balance problem. And I was told that a senior man, about fifty,
sixty years old, would design a rig for us. So I went to him and
saw what he designed. Well, what he designed was essentially a
kind of rig that was an ancient rig, a dipping lug rig. And it
was something that comes from the Mediterranean all the way back
to year 500 B.C. or so [chuckles]. The Arabs still use the lug
rig for their dhows in the Red Sea. But I looked at it, and I
just went back to my books and figured out that the boat would
never move. There was very little sail area. So I designed
something, and I ended up with twice the sail area, and masts
that were twice as high, and with a Bermuda rig, which came into
being around 1915. And so, as I said, it was successful. Our
Lions Club sponsors bought the wood for us for the masts. We
made the masts. And made the booms. We rigged everything. As I
said, it was an exciting time, this whole thing.

Swent : You were doing all this, of course, in addition to school.

Maslach: Oh, yes. I was down at the yacht harbor a lot. But before I got
to high school, there was a family that played a very important
role in my life.

Swent: You have some lovely pictures here.

Maslach: Well, these, I ve chosen them just to illustrate things.

Bill and Helen Andrews

Swent: What do you have?

Maslach: Well, I wanted to talk about people who had major influence on me
during this period. At age twelve I had moved over to the junior
high school, John Swett Junior High School. You had to take shop
classes in seventh and eighth grade. First I took a wood class,
then a sheet metal class, then I took a machine shop class. The
 52

man who was the teacher of that class, the man in the center
there, Bill Andrews--

Swent : You had mentioned him.

Maslach: He was quite a character.

Swent :
Oh, he looks very jovial.

Maslach: As a child he was stricken with infantile paralysis. He had a

brace on one leg. But it didn t slow him down. He actually did
all kinds of things, including professional boxing. He fought
one of the light heavyweight championships in California, even
though he was crippled.

Swent: And this [observing a photograph] is you. Who is the third

person?

Maslach: That s his brother-in-law. We re holding up--I think there s

about half a dozen salmon there.

Swent: Oh, at least.

Maslach: In those days we would go out, and I recall days where we caught
nothing but thirty-six-pound salmon. Those are big. One day,
oh, about five in the morning (it was still quite dark), he
caught a fifty-one-pounder, which is a monster. Very difficult
to get into the boat. This is a picture of a dozen salmon on the
deck of the boat. We also caught striped bass. I remember one
day catching three striped bass, all about twenty pounds each.
In those days, sport fishing was a big thing. Not many people,
but when you went out you could recognize all of the other
people. And it was active. We had a nice cove for striped bass,
and we went out the [Golden] Gate, of course, for salmon.

Swent: Did you need licenses?

Maslach: Oh, yes, you had to have a fishing license; but in those days
there was no lid on salmon for sport fishermen. Today you re
limited to two fish, and that s it, and today you get an awful
lot of fish that are fifteen, eighteen pounds. Half the size
that we were getting. So every once in a while I would come home
with a couple or three big fish. Of course, my mother would
scamper around, giving fish to everyone she knew, the neighbors
and so on [chuckles]. And I think every once in a while she
might have actually taken one of them up to the butcher and he
would sell it.
 53

One of the things that I learned many years later about my

mother was that she was a gambler. You would never think it of
her, because she was such a small and quiet person, but she would
follow the papers and the horses. Our local butcher was the
local bookie, and she would put down bets with him. So it was
rather interesting at that time.

Here s a picture of Bill and his daughter, Nadine, and then

his wife. Bill was a surrogate father to me in many ways,
advising me on various things. His wife Helen was kind of a
combination of surrogate mother and surrogate girl friend. She
was a beautiful woman, and she looked very much like Myrna Loy.
In fact, one time she and I went down for the New Year s
celebrations around Fifth and Market, which is where they were
held at that time, and then we walked up Powell Street and went
into Lefty O Doul s saloon, which at that time was on Powell
between O Farrell and Geary. We crowded in there and went to the
bar. Of course, it was very crowded. But when she got close to
the bar, they flipped. Myrna Loy! Someone gave her his seat,
stool, at the bar, and I was behind her. So she would order
drinks for herself and for me. I was probably seventeen--

sixteen, seventeen.

My first drink with them as a family was up in Walnut Grove,

up on the Delta above Rio Vista. She ordered for me a whiskey
sour, which she thought would be what I would like, which as you

may recall has a slight sweetness. I graduated to Tom Collins

and gin and tonics, stuff like that. I was only sixteen at the
time. But I was big.

This picture here, I was probably fourteen. They were very

good to me because I would go out to their place for dinner every
once in a while, and we would exchange Christmas gifts of a very
simple nature, things like that. I used to take Helen ice

skating. She loved to dance, and I was not a dancer, so we

compromised on ice skating, which I could do very well because I

had a brother-in-law who was an expert skater, Dick Guthrie.

Swent : Where did you ice skate?

Maslach: Well, in the old days, you took the J trolley in the Sunset
District, all the way out to 48th Avenue, where it turns around
and comes back. Right there at the Big Highway, right on the
ocean. About a block and a half south of the J line, which was
on Judah Street, was an ice rink. They just tore it down a few
years ago. But it was there for many, many years. It was run by
a family. I think they came from Australia. Sort of a British
accent, but I think today I would call it much more an Australian
accent .
 54

It was not big enough for hockey, but close to it, so we did
play a variety of games, like broomball, instead of hockey sticks
and a ball rather than a puck. So I would take her out there,
and we would couple skate. Not figure skating with being on your
toes and so on, but dance couple skating. We just kept doing
those kinds of things, and of course the two of them, Bill and
Helen, thought I would for sure be the husband of their daughter,
Nadine .

Swent : I was wondering where the daughter came into the picture. She s

very pretty, too.

Maslach: Well, she was very pretty. She was several years younger. She
went on and married very well, a prominent family in Marin
County, and then there was a divorce after two children. Years
later she met and married a man by the name of Mello. Georgia
Pacific Lumber Company. Very well-to-do fellow. At one time was
one of the highest paid executives in the United States in terms
of dollars per year. There was another divorce, and she now
lives in Pebble Beach, in the forest there. You know, nice house
and so on. We never really hit it off. While she was younger
than I, she just did not have the intarests that I had, so things
did not go that well.

Swent : This is one we might want to include in the volume.

Maslach: Yes [chuckles] .

Swent : The approximate date would be what? Thirty-four?

Maslach: About 34.

Swent :
Okay, let s remember that. Oh, this is--

Maslach: This is my sister s wedding party.

Swent: Oooh! This is your sister.

Maslach: I m over here. Let s see if I can get through this. My sister,
this is my brother, this is a Benedetti girl, this is my father.

Swent : Aha. And this is?

Maslach: I can t recall. Oh, yes, I can. That s cousin Peggy s daughter.
I can t remember which daughter it was. Dick Guthrie, my
sister s husband, who died about ten years ago, was very
handsome, a Canadian, very good ability in anything he did. All
kinds of jobs. He immediately became head of an office. Things
of that nature. He had a very good personality. I m sixteen.
 55

Swent : And the talles;t of the gioup.

Maslach: Right. You can see that--I was what they called "a
long drink of
water. "

Swent: It must have affected you, to be so tall.

Maslach: I got along with it all right. It didn t bother me.

Swent: That s an advantage, isn t it?

Maslach: I think it is. Some people think it isn t.

Swent: Oh, no. I would think that that would make you feel important.

Maslach: This is a picture that my father-in-law took. It s just a boat

called the "Ruby," "Ruby II." It was owned by a man, Stevens,
Pop Stevens. Famous boat because in 1915 he built that boat,
totally, with that rig, which was the modern rig, and he won the
big Diamond Cup of the 1915 Exposition. He was a legendary racer
on the Bay. His son, Babe Stevens, went on after that as well.

This is a picture I took. Really it s a composition. But

that boat down there, lifeboat-looking. That s our boat. We had
just put the masts and so on.

Swent: This is the one you have now?

Maslach: No, no, that s the "Sea Scout."

Swent: All right.

Maslach: If you look in the background--

Swent : And you built that.

Maslach: No, that the hull was given to us.

Swent: I see.

Maslach: And then we just put in the masts and keel. Look back there.
See, on an angle, the masts? That s a clipper ship.

Swent: For heaven s sake.

Maslach: In Richardson Bay and this is Sausalito waterf ront--see that

island back there, with all those trees and one big house?
That s Belvedere.
 56

Swent : Oh, my heavens.

Maslach: There was only about half a dozen houses on Belvedere on that
side. Today it s just covered.

Swent: Completely.

Maslach: And it s the hottest property around.

Memories of Clipper Ships

Swent: And a clipper ship.

Maslach: Well, I have a painting done by one of Doris s uncles. It shows

the Alaska Packer fleet. That would be in there. Shallow water,
that is. That s why it s tilted over. But a painting of the
ships, which you had the clippers were now transformed into work
ships, and they would go up to Alaska, fishing, and they would
put away the f ish--salmon, cod, and everything else into salt,
and this was the fishing fleet that left San Francisco at that
time .

Well, as those ships deteriorated, they would leave them

down there on the flats, so when I was sixteen years old, there
were three or four of them out there. Later, I was building my
own boat, and I was about nineteen or twenty years old. I
remember borrowing a skiff or a little rowboat and going out and
exploring around those ships. Those were fascinating times. I
still have vivid memories of it. Because here s this ship. The
deck is leaning, canted over, and you could tie the boat up and
then climb on board. It was dangerous because those masts and
booms could be falling on you. The whole thing was teetering.
And I could see through the hatchways, and the light would be
coming from the sky through that hatchway, down into the water
down below. And as you would row around, you found that the wood
hull had deteriorated so bad on one side that you could look
inside. Apparently, just a ten-foot hole.

Here s this beautiful color of water within the hull. I

checked it out. There was surprisingly warm water because the
sun heated it all day long, and it never really moved out of
there. It kind of just went up and down. So I used to--
sometimes at lunchtime I would just borrow a skiff from the
shipyard and just row out there and go swimming inside the hull
of this clipper ship [chuckles].
 57

Swent : What a wonderful memory-

Maslach: Yes. I still remember how beautiful it was. I mean, if I had a

camera, it would have been a great subject for a photograph. But
you see, there were so many opportunities in those days if you
just had the initiative, which I never was shy of, to do things.
For example, we couldn t afford much money to just stick the
masts in the boat, so we rowed over to Sausalito. We went to a
harbor there, which was run by a man by the name of Arquez.

This is a famous family in the history of California. Even

early on, 1880, that is, there was an Arquez who was governor.
This is when the old Spanish land-grant people still were a major
part of California. So he was a descendant of that family. He
owned a number of those arks that are along the Sausalito
waterfront in the small harbor in there. We used to put our boat
up for painting and so on there because it was low cost. And he
was very friendly to people like Sea Scouts and so on.

Later, when I built a boat over there in another yard, I

would stay at the Arquez yard because they had a classical wooden
lumber schooner. These were ships that would go up and down the
coast, mostly up, into the doghole harbors that are up and down
the coast, and pick up loads of lumber, including deck loads, and
bring them down to San Francisco. In the early days, they did
not have any power-- just sail. Later days, they would have small
engines .

But I would sleep on this lumber schooner that was called

the "Lassen". It had a forecastle, which was in perfect
condition. A half a dozen people could sleep there, and that s
where I would put my sleeping bag. In the wheelhouse there was a
Norwegian man who ran the yard, so he and I, of course, over the
years got to know each other quite well. I would go there, and I
would listen to Arquez tell stories about the old days and so on,
and of course the Norwegian was fixing up a boat and eventually
went around the world. So to meet people like this when you were
sixteen [chuckles], you know, it was really a very liberating
period.

Swent: Sounds like it.

Maslach: You did not have to sit in downtown San Francisco.

 58

Michel Lafaurie and Fishing Adventures

Swent : And your parents weren t concerned about your doing all this?

Maslach: Oh, my parents, you have to remember, had the first son, and I
was the spare, and so I was just allowed to do whatever I wanted
to do. I really had far more freedom than my brother, four years
older, or my sister, six years older. So I romped everywhere. I

got skates early on. These were the old steel skates, not the
inline skates that you have today.

Swent: With a key?

Maslach: Yes, with a key, and you clamped them on your shoe and so on. I
would skate from downtown San Francisco out to the beach, and I
would skate up in the Marina and the "harbor a lot. Michel
Lafaurie, who I mentioned earlier, in our last session he lived
about three blocks away from me, and we would go fishing a lot,
down at the municipal pier, Aquatic Park. That was a kind of
rig, an arrangement that he had made up, and he would catch smelt
during the smelt season. And then we bought all the equipment to
make crab nets. It had a big ring and a small ring. Within the
small ring was your bait, and between the small ring and the
large ring was a mesh of line, which you wove. It looked
something like chicken wire when you finished. And you dropped
this down on the bay floor, and after a while you would hoist and
if you had any crabs in there they would be trapped.

We were pretty smart. We knew that over there in

Fisherman s Wharf they would have these big crab units, which
were essentially a jailhouse for the crabs. They would dump the
crabs in there when they came in from outside the gate, where
there was much better crab findings. And they would put them in
there and keep them alive.

Well, those things would deteriorate, you know, and there

would be holes in there [chuckles], so you would put your crab
nets down nearby, and so we were getting good crabs. Well, they
didn t let you do that too much because they knew what was
happening. They put out their own nets and retrieved those crabs
that escaped from the jail.

But we would go to the next pier down, the ferry pier, next
to Pier 39, Pier 41 today. And we would crab there, underneath
the pier walk along the wooden structure underneath, and we not
only caught crab but we would spear fish there.
 59

Perch was the main thing you would spear. Perch anywhere
from ten inches up to about sixteen, eighteen. It is a good-
tasting fish, but tends to have a lot of bones. But we did these
things. One of the ways we transported ourselves was I took my
skates apart and I put them onto a rig which was a board, and a
fixed axle on the back with two parts of the skates, and then
forward a beam with a pivot, and then it would be two parts to
the skates, and those would be my front wheels. And then you
would have a line to that beam, one to the right side and one to
the left side, so that you could change your direction. You
would pull this little device. I used to have a little sheltered
section in the front, like housing an engine would be, and in
there I laid my fishing gear and stuff like that.

Swent : Sort of like a scooter?

Maslach: Like a scooter, yes. And we would drag these things up the hills
and then we would just go down the other side. Well, you know,
between downtown San Francisco and Fisherman s Wharf, those were
pretty steep hills.

Swent: They are very steep. But no brakes on these things.

Maslach: The only brakes you had were your shoes, so that didn t last very
long because I was wearing shoe leather out like mad. So we
found wheels. We used to press the sides of our feet against the
wheels for brakes. My mother never knew. She was always proud
that I never had a bicycle during those days because she thought
that was dangerous. [laughter) Little did they know how
dangerous that was! So anyway, we had fun doing those kinds of
things. Michel and I hit it off quite well because we had
similar interests.

Swent: He was the one from Des Alpes?

Maslach: Yes, the Basque family. He went into ham radio. We used to make
radios. I had my own crystal set in those days and would go to
sleep with the earphones on [chuckles]. And then he got into ham
radio and so on, and he had his own station. He got his license.
So we would be up there on the roof of his house. He would get
going and pick up someone in Australia or someone in South
America. Ham operators cover the world. So it was very
interesting doing that with him. He was much better electrically
than 1 was, electronics-oriented than I was. He went to work for
IBM. Went through junior college. He never finished a four-year
college. But he was a sharp apple, and he moved up rapidly and
did very well in that era.

Swent: Did you have jobs, paying jobs, earning money?

 60

Maslach: Yes. I ve got one more thing to say about he and I,

Swent: Oh, sorry.

Memories of Hunter s Point and China Basin

Maslach: One of the best trips that we did very often was to skate from
our house downtown, or take the trolley quite a ways. That s
what we usually did. Out to Hunter s Point. Hunter s Point was
a very interesting area in the days before the war. We had, of
course, the drydock there. But that whole area between Hunter s
Point and downtown San Francisco was a graveyard of shipping.
You would have old clipper ships, of course. You had all kinds
of barges and other kinds of commercial craft, and they were just
beached up on the mudflats and allowed to just disintegrate. I

always recall we would get down there fairly close to the

shipyard area, which was off by itself. Fields between Third
Street, which was the main drag out of San Francisco, down the
Peninsula, and Hunter s Point.

And you, of course, went through some old areas there of

housing. Bayview, for example, had beautiful little shopping
areas and so on, but it also had this opera house I always
recall. The opera house at Bayview is still there. Historic
building. But we would get down to the water, and we would go to
the Chinese camps. There were half a dozen of them just along
these old ships that were disintegrating. Chinese families would
be living there, or they would be living up in little houses up
in the fields.

What we would do is buy shrimp, cooked shrimp, in a bag the

size you get peanuts in at a baseball game. It would cost about
five cents, ten cents at the most, later on. And you would just
walk up in the fields and just sit up there, and you would have
nothing but fields and over here was the drydock, which was a
wonderful looking piece of something. You know, we didn t
understand exactly everything about it. But out in front of you,
looking up at San Francisco, you could just see miles of old
ships disintegrating on the mudflats. And the dominant ship that
was there was a ferryboat. It was the Bay City. That was the
name of it. You would see it. It was canted over so that the
side of it was facing you. On the side of it was, of course, the
big name, Bay City. It was an old walking beam ferry that was
just dumped there, just wasting away.
 61

So it was a very interesting area. We had shipyards and

what have you. You had the Chinese camps, the Chinese shrimp
fishing on the bay. There was still oyster fishing then, too, in
South Bay. Now pollution. I haven t heard of oysters in the bay
in forty years. But the Chinese camps there and later, of
course, in Marin County, they were very active. It was
interesting.

Swent: Amazing how it s changed.

Maslach: And, you know, it wasn t the modern Chinese that were there.
These were Chinese men with pigtails, long pigtails, and costumes
which were quite Oriental. It was an exotic kind of a place.

Swent: And they lived by the shrimping they did?

Maslach: Oh, yes. They were living by shrimping up at China Camp up

there, Marin County, up to just a few years ago.

Swent: I remember reading of it.

Maslach: I remember five years ago or so, maybe ten years, going up there
and getting bay shrimp cocktails, right there at China Camp. It
was quite up-to-the-minute. But I haven t heard any more about
shrimping up there.

Swent: No. It sounds like a wonderful childhood.

Maslach: What I m trying to picture to you is the fact that it was just an
exciting life. I mentioned last time that I was involved with
the Boy Scouts, but I never went to a summer camp with the Boy
Scouts, simply because we did not have that much money. You have
to remember that I had a six-year-older sister and a four-year-
older brother. Both of them went to college. As our father said
repeatedly, since I was young enough to understand, "You are
going to go to college." She went to the University of
California School of Art down at North Beach, San Francisco. It
actually was a famous art school with teachers that are today
renowned for their art work. It later became the San Francisco
Art Institute, which it is today. It s a beautiful square block
of academia. [The name of the school in the 1930s was California
School of Fine Arts. It was an affiliate of the University of
California, --ed.]

And then my brother went on to UC Berkeley.

Swent: What are their names?

 62

Maslach: My brother s name is Michael--was Michael. He died several years

ago. And my sister is named Sophie. In Polish, Mihach and
Zosia. In Polish, the name George is pronounced YAY-jick.

Swent: Oh, I won t try that.

Vic Sharp and Al Christopher son, Scout Leaders

Maslach: [laughs] But one of the best things that we did in the Boy
Scouts before we got too involved in the Sea Scouts--we kind of
overlapped thatwas to work with Vic Sharp and Al
Christopherson, who were the regional Scout leaders for San
Francisco. The chief of the Scouts was Raymond 0. Hansen, a
legendary figure in San Francisco. ^Vic Sharp was the associate,
under Raymond Hansen, and Al Christopherson was a staff member.

Vic Sharp was an extraordinarily able fellow. One time he

was driving instructor for Greyhound Bus Lines, so he taught
people how to drive. But he went into scouting and was very good
at it. He had a very good mind for the youth, also. He was a
very good administrator. He knew how to use people. It was
always a shared experience. He did not just turn things over to
you. He knew how to delegatebut he did quiet supervision. He
had a wonderful, dry sense of humor.

I don t know just how we got together, but starting when I

was about fifteen, we went into a program of rebuilding what was
then called Camp Roy-A-Neh. That was in Cazadero.

It was some Indian statement which I cannot tell you what it

means today. It is now called Camp C.C. Moore. Obviously, this
was named after the Moore family, Moore Drydock, somewhere down
there in Oakland. What happened up there at camp was that
during a winter windstorm--rainstorm--a grove of redwood trees
fell down on the main building, which housed the kitchens and the
dining area for five hundred scouts. It really demolished the
deck in front and part of the dining area. It did not touch the
kitchen area.

I would walk down to the Scout headquarters, which was on

O Farrell and Market. There would be Al and Vic in his car.
They had all kinds of food. Another man came with me. He was a
Mexican-American. And all I can remember of that is his first
name, but I have now forgotten his last name. We didn t see much
of him. He went up a fair number of times. He was excellent in
 63

cutting and chopping and sawing wood, especially with the big
saws that we had.

Rebuilding Camp Roy-a-Neh

Maslach: We would leave about four or four-thirty, Friday, and go up to

the camp. We would stay at the chief s house in the camp
sleeping bags. Vic was an excellent chef. He would cook, and we
would have our meals, and we d also look over what was needed to
be done. And then we started doing these things. We, of course,
cut trees and moved them off the building. I m talking up to
six-foot-diameter redwood trees.

I also got involved in doing all kinds of other things,

But
which had been taught to do by my father.
I Starting at about
age twelve, my father, who had one job with the Leighton
Industries in all these restaurants, would take me along. And
the reason he took me along originally, of course, was if he ever
needed some tools, I could run back to the house and pick them up
and bring them to him. But you do, you know, absorb knowledge,
and so this osmotic process, watching my father fix leaky
plumbing or bad wiring or somethingso after a while you learned
how to wire fuse boxes. (We didn t have circuit breakers in
those days.) We also learned how to do plumbing, and learned a
certain level of woodworking. Of course, twelve on out, starting
wood working classes in junior high school. And sheet metal
classes. It all kind of just melded together.

So I would go around to these dairy lunches, they called

them in those days small cafeterias. Of course, the manager
always loved us. We fixed something, you know. And some of
these things were really messy, like sewers, a sewer clog. It
was just a hell of a job! Usually in the middle of the night.
So I would be out there with my father, and then we would go back
home. But in the meantime, I learned.

So by the time I was sixteen, I was not only doing all the
maintenance work in the apartment house with twenty-three
apartmentswashers and switches and other kinds of things but I
was also doingwith my brother and sister and my mother-
painting. We painted apartments. We had professionals coming in
to do ceilings and wallpapering, but everything elsethe trim
and so on- -we were doing. This was a lot of fun but also quite a
chore! Summertime was when we used to do all of this, so I did
not have much of a vacation time, as I said.
 When I started doing these weekend trips, which were in the
fall and the winter and the spring, with Vic Sharp and Al--my
brother went a couple of times but he dropped out. He was in
college at that time. I was in high school. The next thing you
know, why, Al Christopherson and I were laying down three-inch
water line for half a mile from Austin Creek. Fire water, up to
ten-thousand-gallon wood tanks. A professional would come up
there and stay for a couple of weeks, and I was hired to be his
assistant. I learned how to tear down big water tanks, and how
to put them back again.

It was really ancient-type work because [of] this redwood

tank and you could see the simplicity of the design. There were
all kinds of little things. For example, when you fitted the
vertical two-inch by six-inch redwood staves, you would come
against the next stave. Well, what s to prevent leakage?
Believe it or not, they have tules, big reeds, long. And you
would cut a tule in half and place it between those staves, and
then of course that tule with water would expand and seal. It s
an ancient seal, probably used by the ancient Indians, you know?
So I always remember being with that man and learning so much
about it.

We did all kinds of things. We dug wells in springs. There

would be two springs that I remember. One was not delivering
enough water for us. This was the drinking water. The springs
were just deep cuts sixteen feet deep, about two-foot wide, lined
with redwood on both sides and of course bracing in between. But
deterioration, the sloughing of the soil, would clog up the
system. You have to go into the springs like a mine shaft and
then dig out the muck, all the mud and so on, and then you dig
and make the spring longer. The more area you had, you cut
across this water flow, which is under ground, the more water you
got.

remember how dramatic it was. We were just cutting

I

through, and I was cutting on one side, and all of a sudden just
the one shovel full, and man, I was getting twice the amount of
water out of a small area than the whole spring before. So I
called Al and got him in there, and he said, "Boy, you hit it."
So we just put all our energy into that one side, and we
increased the amount of fresh water, the drinking water. The
spring was up the hill and would come down by pipe into the big
tanks, and the big tanks would distribute it all the way
throughout the camp. Then we had another set of tanks that were
for fire water, pumped up from the creek, a half mile away. A
lot of big piping. And we were doing this on weekends and so on.
 65

Then they found out I could do carpentry, so I was doing

that, finishing a hospital room and things. And then they
started, a year later, taking down the tents and platforms
because they would deteriorate so fast, and they put up good
platforms which were covered with a permanent roof. These would
sleep eight Scouts. They had lockers. It was just sort of
modern.

By the way, they found out I could lay roofing paper. The
secret is that you would take the roll of roofing compound and
you would lay it out where you needed it and cut it to size, and
you would leave it and cut the next one to size, leave it and so
on. What you would do is let the sun hit it for a day or so, two
days, and the sun would heat it and it would lie flat. Then
tacked it in. [That was] why there were no ripples or creases.
Well, I discovered that all on my own. When they found out I
could do that, I was in charge of all roofing. Over a couple of
years, we put up about fifty units. I knew a lot about
foundations and concrete and wood beams.

Swent : You had a very practical experience.

Maslach: I was doing the plumbing, and they hired a local plumber to come
up and do some work. They turned me over to him and I would help
him. After about a couple of days, the guy went to Vic and said,
"What the hell do you want me for? He knows as much as anybody."
So I was doing the measuring and so on; he was doing the cutting
and fitting; but I was doing quite a few of the real important
things .

At this point I learned how to drive a car [chuckles]. My

family didn t have a car, but this plumber had a little Model A,
which he had cut down, a Model A roadster, and he put a little
truck bed on it and took out the rumble seat. He just said to
me--remember I m big for my age--he says, "Drive up and get
,

something." I said, don t know how to drive." He was

"I

appalled at that, so we got out in the fields and he gave me a

lesson in driving. So here I was, driving around. I would
shift, you know. At the beginning, all I did was put it into low
and would just go right up the road, which was not paved, park
it, turn it off, get whatever you wanted, turn around and go down
in low gear [chuckles]. Never shifted [laughs]. He taught me to
shift.

We had a ton-and-a-half truck, a Dodge, and something went

wrong with it and it was parked on the side of the road down
there around Guerneville. So Vic, Al and I went down and
couldn t get it to work, so they went off to get the mechanic. I
sat there a while and eventually what happened was--I think I ve
 66

got too many people in here but the guy fixed it, and it was
running .

Here was this ton-and-a-half truck. It had a sixteen-foot

bed on the truck. And Al just got out and Vic says, "You know
how to drive." I didn t have a license. I was about seventeen
years old. I got into this thing, and I started it. It had
extra gearing because it was meant for commercial-industrial
work. I got it into low and then into second, and I just
followed him. He was in his car. So I drove several miles
[chuckles], without a license.

So these were my experiences that I had when I was really

just a kid.

Swent : You were very courageous, I must say.

Maslach: Well, not really. I was willing to try anything, essentially. I

was supervised, and if someone said, "Hey, you re okay, do it,"
I had enough respect for these people that I would agree with
them.

Working at the Crescent M Camp in the High Sierra

Maslach: The Boy Scout thing blossomed in another area. Vic Sharp started
the Crescent M Camp, which was up in the mountains. He basically
worked out of Yosemite but not the valley but out of Tuolomne
Meadows or Lake Tenaya, that area, up in the high country. I m

talking eight, nine, ten thousand feet as our base camp. The
concept was pretty simple. Two or three days of acclimation at a
base camp, with day tripswalking, hikingand then after that
you packed everything in your bag pack. And we would have twenty
or thirty Scouts and two or three leaders, and we would take big
loops .

You would take a big loop over from, say, Tuolomne Meadows
and you would go over Tioga Pass, which is 10,000 [feet], and
down the other side, and from there you would go down one of the
creeks towards the Owens Valley, and then you would go along up
the trail and back over passes. One I remember was over twelve
thousand foot, and back into Tuolomne Meadows. That was one
loop.

Another loop would be north. We would go up to various

lakes, and then you would get over toward the Matterhorn area and
then come back on a lower level trail into the Grand Canyon of
 67

the Tuolomne, and then back up that steep section from four
thousand feet up to nine thousand feet. So this was really my
introduction to the mountains, with a real vengeance.

The first time they set up this thing, we had easily a ton
of food, mostly canned, and two tents which were set up with wood
frames, and we set them up at Lake Tenaya. That s near Tuolomne
Meadows. Beautiful area. There used to be a big CCC camp there.
It was interesting to look over the ruins of that camp and so on.
There was a big pipeline that came from Mount Tenaya, with fresh
water. Very wonderful, fresh-tasting water, right from the
glacier over there. And we re up here on this level plain as the
lake is slowly filling up. It s a glacial lake.

The plan was that we would take this truck and go up there-
Vic and Al and somebody else--just Vic, Al and I, I guess--yes--
we would unload, on a weekend, and we would set up the tents and
put all the stuff inside the tents. One tent was for storage of
the food; the other tent was for the kitchen. Then you ate
outside. Of course, you camped outside under the trees. In
those days, air mattresses were not common, so you had your
sleeping bags or blanket rolls.

We had quite a time. We went on several very interesting

trips. I got my education in San Francisco extended a little
bit. There was a man named Mike Powell, no longer around. He
was, oh, fifteen, twenty years older than I. He was one of the
most wonderful, polite, gracious, adventuresome people that I ve
ever known. He was from the Deep South, and he had a wonderful,
soft accent. It was always, "Yes, ma am. No, ma am. Yes, sir.
No, sir" and things like that. But he was an alcoholic. Very
handsome fellow. He was the kind of person who had lived a life
on the road. You know, one step better than the hobos, and he
knew how to do anything and everything.

Swent : He was a packer?

Maslach: Everything, everything. You could ask him to do something, he

knew just what to do. I remember Vic or Al or I--just two of us
--would try to find Mike Powell, who lived in the flophouses on
then Third Street, Mission, Howard, that area, which was pretty
bad, really, in those Depression days. But here I am, sixteen,
seventeen, going with Vic or Al into the bars on Third Street,
Howard. You know, very interesting. As I told you, I had my
first drink when I was about sixteen!

We would go in there, and Al, say, was with me, and he would
order a couple of beers, and these places had what they called a
free lunch. If you ordered a beer, you would get a plate, a
 68

small plate, and they would have bread, cheese, ham, all kinds of
very interesting lunches, you know. And so we would go there and
talk to the bartender. You had to buy a beer in order to be able
to talk to him [chuckles]. You couldn t just come in off the
street, not doing anything. We asked him if he had seen Mike.
Well, Mike was a character. No, he hadn t seen Mike; they had
thrown him out and so on. So we tried so-and-so s.

In those days, Third Street was just a line of beer houses.

People from the office areas and so on would go there for lunch.
It was really very interesting. Sort of like a German bier
stube. You know, in Germany, the same kind of atmosphere. So we
walked down Third Street, looking and sooner or later, we would
find him. It was a matter of dragging out and I really mean
putting his arm over your shoulder and taking him and just find
the flophouse, get his luggage, pay the bill, and get in the car.
Somewhere along the line, of course, -we fed him and drove to the
camp. There s no way out! There were no wheels. It was a long
hike to get to a bar. The last time I saw him he had dried out
and beat the alcoholism and he was a park ranger in Yosemite
Park. He knew Yosemite backwards and forwards. [looking at
photos] That s a picture of him by a string of burros that we
used at the Scout camp my first year. We only used the burros
one year; after that it was always back packing.

But these are people one is a man by the name of Lou. He

came from a prominent family in San Francisco. They owned a big
logging business. My brother was there. Lou was an outstanding
person. He and I--we all got along beautifully. In the first
place, he was one of the most handsome people I have ever seen in
my life. And he was an athlete in any sport. You name it.
Competitive. Good God! If you were playing baseball, stay away
from him. He would run you down. He was just a great, great
guy. He was killed on practically the last day of the war
against Japan, on Okinawa. He was a captain, flushing Japanese
out using flamethrowers and stuff like that in those days,
throwing grenades into caves, and a sniper got him. Really one
of the great losses of the war.

I mean, I have many people in my family- -my brother, for

example, was a paratrooper. He actually landed in Japan, but not
fighting; at that time the Japanese had given up, but they were
scheduled to land, if they had not given up. These are the kinds
of people that were in Scouting. I remember another leader, a
man by the name of Bob Anino. That man worked as a pianist. He
worked for the RKO-Orpheum chain. He played piano in small
motion picture houses, which was pretty common in those days,
before talkies. But then he also played for the chorus lines.
He was a pianist and a very good one. He was also a composer and
 69

so on. Great sense of humor. Came from South America, but what
nation I don t know. But Anino. He was a kind of big jokester,
a funnyman .

One thing about him that was characteristic was he rarely

opened his mouth. He would speak with his lips closed,
practically. The reason was he had bad teeth. Bad teeth were a
big problem in those days. I mean, let me tell youthis will
kill dentistry people that read thisbut they had Painless
Parker, who was a dentist. You could go down to Painless Parker
and have a tooth pulled for one dollar. That was dentistry.

Swent : If it hurt, you pulled it.

Maslach : That s right. So Bob Anino. There was another leader in there,
amateur, you know, Boy Scout leader. All I know is the name,
Jim. He was an architect. Actually, he became quite a prominent
architect in San Francisco. But he was a very sophisticated,
intellectual type, you know. Even the people that went on these
trips, because they were really exciting trips they were for
Senior Scouts and Senior Scout leaders.

Swent: Were these members of the Lions Club?

Maslach: Oh, no. These were other troops. Yes, this is regional.

That was a picture I took when we were all sitting up on top

of Yosemite Falls, where I did one of the stupidest things of my
life, but I didn t get damaged doing it, but if you remember
Yosemite Falls

Swent: Yes, it s very high.

Maslach: It s a big drop [laughter]. There s a little ledge in the

granite. This is the hard quartz. This is like I m talking
about something that high [demonstrating] that sticks above

Swent: Three inches thick?

Maslach: Yes.

Maslach: I was just talking about being up on top of Yosemite Falls with a
bunch of Scouts. I remember going out on this quartz outcropping
which was parallel with the edge of the cliff. I went out there,
oh, twenty, thirty feet. I m able to kind of look down between

my feet. A couple of thousand feet down there. And then, of

course, you got a good view in that direction of Lost Arrow,
 70

which was the next piece of property up there that had a name. I
got back.

The reason I mention it is that not too long after the trip
I remember having a bit of nightmare about it; that was it. So
for years after I had done that stupid thing, I would wake up in
the middle of the night because you could have just slipped off
there so easily and fallen to the bottom.

Swent : I m interested in your photography, too. You had a good camera?

Maslach: No, this was a poor camera, but 1 always have been able to do
photography.

Swent: Nice pictures. Awfully good pictures.

Maslach: I set that picture up. I set the camera up, and I told someone
to take it. I did a lot of fishing up there.

Swent: I see. That s a lovely picture.

Maslach: Here s another one of Lou and my brother.

Swent: The other previous one was you fishing in a stream up in the
Sierra. And this is Lou and your brother, with some pack burros.

Maslach: Right. This was just a comic thing. You have to kind of look at
it very closely, but my brother is in there and Al Christopherson
is in there. The person closest to you was Harry Lowe. He was a
Senior Scout with us. He was my brother s age. He looked like
an Indian. Very dark complexion. He loved to sunbathe. He was
just a piece of mahogany. He was a great hiker and very good
fisherman and just a wonderful person to be with.

Working at Yosemite Park, 1937, 1938

Maslach: What happened was that starting in 37, I got busy in the High
Sierra stuff. We rented our burros--mules whenever we had ,

mules from the Yosemite Park Curry Company. One day, they
noticed me, and when the period was over for the Scout camp,
which was two weeks, you want a job?" So I worked for the
"Do

Yosemite Park Curry Company doing all kinds of simple jobs in the
beginning, like swamping out, you know, cleaning the stables and
stuff like that, and taking care of and feeding the mules,
horses, pack horses all the pack stuff. I had nothing to do
 71

with the riding people. They were in a different class, But I

would go along on rides every once in a while as a dude.

But most of the time this started especially in 38-- 37

and 38--they turned me over to a couple of big, bulky Indians
who knew how to do everything. I was to just help them. One of
the first things that I remember is that somewhere along the
line, the telephone line was broken. It was a telephone line
that went from the valley up through Little Yosemite up to Merced
Lake. From Merced Lake it went up to Vogelsang camp and down
into Tuolome Meadows and then over to Mount Hoffman, Tenaya, and
back down into Yosemite. It was a big loop. It was just a
simple line with a crank-operated telephone.

So you would go along and you would be watching sometimes

you were hiking where you couldn t use horses; other times on
horseback, and you would have a pack mule with food and so on.
You never knew when you were going to be stuck somewhere, doing
work. You would go along looking for the break. You would see
that wire up there between trees. And, of course, somewhere
sooner or later a branch fell and took out the wire, or a tree
fell and took out the wire. Nineteen thirty-eight was when their
big problem was lodgepole pines which were being attacked by the
miner beetle, which quickly destroyed large groves of pine. We
would hike for miles up to Tuolomne Meadows and not see a living
tree but see hundreds and hundreds thousands and thousands of
these pines that had fallen down.

At first there was always the problem of resupplying the

camps up there. You would take a string of mules, and you would
go to Merced, bring food, and also tanks of butane gas for the
cooking. Of course, there was a ranger there; I always remember
the ranger s wife. I m talking about handsome people. But this
was just idyllic. A young couple with a child in this beautiful
small house [chuckles] up there, nine thousand feet, doing the
ranger work and so on. I thought about being a ranger, briefly.

Anyway, I had started working. I worked for them in 37 and

38, Yosemite Park Curry Company.

Swent : All summer?

Maslach: Pretty much. A very strange outfit to work for. You always had
to work, but could never build up overtime. They didn t like the
idea of paying time and a half for overtime, so if you started
running overtime, which of course you do if you were packing
outside with parties, you just had to sit around Yosemite Valley
or Tuolomne Meadows. There, of course, I would just hike and
 72

climb everywhere, and I just had an awful lot. of fin just doing
things on my own.

Swent : How much did they pay you?

Maslach: The pay at that time was fifty cents an hour and room and board,
which was exactly what I was paid up therewhen I was sixteen,
seventeen up at camp Roy-A-Neh. That s what I got. And here I
was in the camp, looking at all these Scouts. I m only a couple
of years older, and I was being paid [chuckles], doing all this
work.

Swent: Were there any benefits at all?

Maslach: No, no benefits. There was no such thing as a benefit. Nothing.

You never heard of it.

Swent: What would have happened if you had been injured?

Maslach: I have no idea, no idea. Never heard of anybody injured. Maybe

a cut or something.

Swent: It was pretty hazardous work.

Maslach: But I don t remember any benefits at all. The head of the
Yosemite Park Curry Company, of course, was the Curry family- -Ma
and Pa Curry. And the chief operating officer at the time was
Tresidder, who later went on to some work down at Stanford and
was the vice president of Stanford.

I got to know Ma Curry quite well. Pa Curry was sort of the

maitre d of Yosemite. He was most famous for the voice that
1

everybody heard when they had the fire fall. He would yell up to
Glacier Point in that big voice of his, "Let the fire fall."
Remember that?

Swent: Yes.

Maslach: Ma Curry was just something right out of the past. She looked
very much like the Parisian figures of a Utrillo painting today.
I m talking about, the Utrillo painting, back then, in the 1900s,
early 1900s. She had the same up hairdo with big center topknot,
which was very common amongst older women. And then she had
steel-grey hair. She was just a straight up-and-down fireplug.
She would have long-sleeved blouses, practical type, solid color
sometimes, sometimes flowery. They were quite voluminous. They
certainly weren t form-fitting. She probably did not have the
form to fit. She had a long skirt, black, went right down to the
ground .
 73

Swent: This is up at Yosemite?

Maslach: Yes, Yosemite. Summertime. [laughter]

Hot. And, you know, that skirt was heavy material. I

remember seeing it on the dust there. She had some old-fashioned
shoes. I m pretty sure they were laced up or something, you
know? But the most distinctive thing about Ma Curry was that she
had, around the middle a belt, which was a key chain. I think it
was attached to the belt in some way, or it might have its own
separate belt. I can t remember the details of that. But what
was most distinctive was the ring, which was about six to eight
inches in diameter. You know, just a hundred keys. These were
old-fashioned keys, you know? Not the Schlage lock type keys
that you have today. The old-fashioned ones that you poked into
a hole and turned. Very simple arrangement for opening the door.

Swent: They called them skeleton keys?

Maslach: Yes, skeleton keys. So if you ever needed something (and

everybody needed something), you had to go to Ma Curry, tell her
what you needed to do. You needed this key for this particular
area, and she would look at you [chuckles], you know. She didn t
smile much. She was a stern person. She would look at you and
ask questions and then take this key ring and find the proper one
--none of them were labeled. She would find the proper key.
"Make sure you give it back" and so on. "Where will you be?" So
she would say where she was going to go. Okay. So you would go
and get into the closet and do something or get some equipment
and whatevereverything, you know, that you neededand so you
would do this and you would go back. "Okay, Ma," and give back
the key.

Swent: That s real hands-on management.

Maslach: Oh, micro-management! [laughter] You couldn t believe. That was

a really big operation. I was still doing all kinds of little
things, but not much plumbing or not much electrical. Some of it
every once in a while, when they found out I knew something about
electricity. So it was a lot of fun, but I was mostly in the
back country. You know, to be paid and to do work in the back
country, you know [chuckles] --goof ing off to go fishing. You
can t beat it. It was a wonderful, wonderful life.

We got a little slow in one of the years there--! think 38

--and Harry Lowe also decided he would like to work there, so he
got a job. He was a busboy and then he was a bellhop down at the
 74

old Yosemite Lodge, which was pretty old. It was the same
location but pretty primitive. We weren t having many people
coming for packing trips and so on, so the chief packer said that
he had a job we could do, take us out in the back country, and
put trail markers up. I said okay.

So Harry Lowe and I were assigned horses and one mule. The
mule was fitted with a harness which was actually very simple.
And behind the mule was a wheel with a counter on it that rotated
so that as you went along the trail you measured the distance.
One rotation of the wheel was about two-foot diatneter--this would
be about, I think, it was five feet per rotation. This device
measured the footage between where we started and where we wanted
to put the first marker.

In the old days, what you had was another machine that had a
platen about a foot in diameter, and around the edge of that
platen was letters and numerals. And so you would rotate that
platen around until you had the proper numeral or letter, and
then you would press the device against a tape of leadlead
tape. The platen would impress the letter or the number onto
that tape. So to put a trail marker on it there are still some
in existence, I m sure, in the back countryyou would say,
Merced Lake space two point zero [2.0].

Our job was to repair all the tapes and also go to a lot of
new areas with new tapes. You would go up this trail and what
you would do is look for a healthy tree that s going to last for
a while, fairly young but not too young. And you would make a
tape and tack it onto that tree, right there. Identify it by
making a blaze on the tree. The entire park and the Sierra was
just filled with markers like this, which were started back in
John Muir s days .

You see, before Yosemite became a national park it was under

the control of the military. There was a famous Polish
cavalryman, and in order to keep his men working and in good
shape, they built all the first trails in Yosemite, not for
tourists but for fire control. And they would put up markers
which werenot tapes but with a slash, a blaze. These trail
markers were still throughout the place, and you -recognized the
different trails that there were. Each trail had a different
kind of a marker.

Swent: These were metal tapes that you put around the tree?

Maslach: They would only be about six inches long. And they would be on
the surface of the tree. In order to make them more visible, you
would take an axe and remove the bark, so you had a wound in the
 75

tree. But there would be a marker. So for about three weeks or

so, I had the most wonderful time.

Swent: Oh, yes!

Maslach: Just hiking all these trails. So I can honestly say to you there
wasn t a trail in Yosemite I had not hiked and a lot of them I
put up the trail markers.

Swent: Wonderful experience.

Maslach: Absolutely. That was 38, and I was in junior college.

Working as a Printer s Devil

Maslach: But ray first job at working was when I was in junior high school,
and our Scoutmaster and two of his associates also in the
Scouting business they were both Scoutmasters; they were
amateur, not prof essional--they were in another troop and they
had a small printshop. "Printing You Will Like" was their motto.
It was first a printshop out on Divisadero Street. I would go
there from junior high school and work as a printer s devil. My
pay was twenty-five cents an hour. I was about thirteen, fifteen

years old. Soon after they were there, they moved down to
another storefront, which was on Golden Gate, near Larkin, which
was only two blocks from my house. I went to work for them and
did printer s devil work. The usual thing is you take type that
had been set and break it down and return it into the proper
cubicles in these beautiful two-foot by four-foot receptacles for
lead type. You had to memorize essentially where each letter
would go.

So 1 learned very quickly, and after a while I was setting

type for various small things, like, if you wanted a business
card, letterhead, envelopes. And I started running presses, a
hand press. They had two hand presses. It was very interesting
work because you had to be dexterous. What you did is you would
go in first with your left hand and pull out what was printed and
then with your right hand take a fresh piece of paper and put it
into the proper position. You also had to watch the ink because
you had to put enough ink so that you would have the proper, you
know, whatever you were printing.

Swent: So it wasn t a continuous press.

Maslach: Oh, yes. It was a rotary press.

 76

Swent :
Putting the paper in as it rolled around.

Maslach: And if you left your fingers in there, the rollers would roll on
your fingers, which of course you never did.

Swent: Not more than once, anyhow.

Maslach: Then they had a power press which was a bigger press. Every once
in a while I would run that hydraulic press which was really
quite good. But the sad part of it was that they went broke. So
I think the last month or so my money was never collected. I
mean, 1 netted far less than twenty-five cents an hour for the
number of hours that I worked there. But that was my first job.
It was interesting work.

Swent: You learned to mind your Ps and Qs?

Maslach: Well, 1 saw another part of history, really. San Francisco had
an enormously good reputation for printing. It was the printing
center for the entire West Coast. And some of the greatest
printers, Grabhorn Press and others, they started there. I met,

actually, some of these people. It s amazing how printers are

inclined to talk to each other and help each other out.

So much for me and my jobs and so on. Let s spend a few

minutes thinking about the period that we re talking about. We
had moved from the Depression days of 1929, essentially, into the
Depression days of the thirties. But there was an entirely
different atmosphere. Roosevelt had been elected, and all kinds
of programs had been started. You could see these programs. I
remember walking around, for example, in the 1932 period, seeing,
you know, those apple stands and people selling apples. I used
to go down to the waterfront a lot. That was pretty bad, you
know. Harry Bridges was just beginning to get started as a labor
leader, but there was still a long ways to go.

You could just see the misery of those Depression days. As

I said to you, I once in a while felt that I went to bed a little
hungry. We have had nothing as bad as in those days. I recall
the great strike of 1934. I would, as I said, use my roller
skates and I would go down to the waterfront. When they had that
general strike, the National Guard was called out, and on top of
all the piers were machine guns and people, soldiers. There were
pictures in the paper, so you knew it was for real, you know?
There were soldiers down on the waterfront.

Nineteen thirty-four was when they had the shooting which

resulted in the death of--I think it was a longshoreman, but I m
not sure. A union member, that s for sure. I just by chance was
 77

in that area. I heard a shot and I just skated over there, and
there is this guy. The second time I saw a dead man with a
bullet wound. So I just was in the middle of this great upsurge
of activity. It was chilling to see so many of these things.

Also, when we would go with the Boy Scout camps up in the

Sierra in the summertime, we ordered food and we would buy fresh
food on the road. Of course, between here and Yosemite, you have
wonderful food marketsModesto and Merced. We would buy cases
of fruit for twenty-f..ve cents or ten cents. Five cents for a
lug of tomatoes. You would see all this beautiful food. At the
same time, you had that image of those people in the city with no
food. As Roosevelt pointed out, it was a matter of distribution,
you know, getting it there and so on. I always remember seeing
this.

Galileo High School

Maslach: Of course, as I grew older, why, I got to the problems of

schooling at the high school level in which I had teachers who

educated me for the first time about the internationalism of our
society and the fact that there was a big world out there, not
just the United States. I had great teachers in high school,
Galileo High. 1 can remember, to start with, Mr. Bartholomew,
who was teaching geometry there at that time. Age fourteen and a
half, I met Doris Cuneo, who was sitting in front of me in that
class. She was thirteen and a half. She turned around, they had
these backs to the seats, you know, and she asked if I had gotten
a certain problem. I did and so on. I remember a girl put her
arm back over that ledge that stuck out the back of your seat,
and one of the boys would always push down on her elbow, you
know? Which would hurt her a little [chuckles]. So there was
teasing starting right there, at that age.

But he was one of these teachers in the Depression who came

to school in three-piece suits, and the vest was perfect and the
tie was out of this world. He was an outstanding mathematician
who could explain things beautifully. I remember my senior year
--just to jump around a little here--I had a teacher for civics.
She was actually an attorney; passed the bar and so on, and was
teaching because there were no jobs for attorneys. She was
outstanding in teaching you modern history of the world.

Swent : Do you remember her name?

 78

Maslach: Miss Lyon. She was a real outgoing person with high standards,
and a sharp, sarcastic tongue when she needed it. But she was a
person who really had a true liberal viewpoint of history in the
modern day, and she was imparting this to us as teenagers.
Remember, my senior year was 1937. Spanish Civil War. The
Germans and Italians in Spain. The dive bombing of Guernica,
where the Germans showed what they could do. And Franco, Hitler.

Swent : Your family had not maintained contact with anyone in Poland?

Maslach: We had maintained contact, but in those days things were very
bad, and we were playing it safe. We did not talk too much. So
we were a European family, of course, through our Polish home
clubs and dances and all those things. But in terms of politics,
it was my father who was, of course, with Roosevelt, helped him
in 32 and so on, and continued to support him. We have these
letters from Roosevelt, thanking us. Things like that. So we
were active, with Hiram Johnson as the senator who came to our
house quite often. And then there were all these other local
politicians .

II

Maslach: I was aware of the international politics. As I told you, I was

an avid reader and certainly reading history was one of the big
areas I was active in. But there was a person like Miss Lyon who
could put things into proper perspective and showed you the
relationships of things that had happened. Things happen. You
have to understand what was happening. The Civil War in Spain.
The first major part of the conflict. But it had so many
subtleties in it that you had to know who the players were. Who
was Franco? Where did he come from? What troops did he have?
And who did he bring over? Well, he brought over the Moroccan
troops, which were terroristic in the Spanish Civil War.

This is where my education took off--I really began to think

independently. Junior, senior year of high school. Mrs. Metzger
was my English teacher. Tall, spare woman, wonderful ability,
great interest in literature, especially of Shakespeare. We went
through a variety of Shakespeare plays and what have you, and she
just didn t give us the kind of shallow overall picture of
Shakespeare. We went into the words, and you figured out what
was being said, in substantive terms of the times of the play,
and you learned a lot about politics, if I could put it that way.

I mean, when we studied Macbeth, I mean, you take that first

scene of the three witches and a pot boiling. They re giving you
a lot of history right there. Very sharp. [tape interruption]
 79

Swent : She must have been a wonderful teacher.

Maslach: Well, all of these teachers there were many others. In

mathematics there was an older man whose name was Mr. Rockwell,
teaching trigonometry, you know, and solid geometry. We had top,
top teachers in those days. I don t know if they were teaching
us the way you would be taught in college, but there was a
sophistication to the teaching there in Galileo High School that
I mit s still remarkable to me that the teaching was at that
level. I think in large part it was because of the Depression

days. The quality of the jobs, the quality of the people in

those jobs but the teacher s job was a very highly respected
job, and the salaries were quite good for the Depression days.

But it was at that point in my life that, as I say, I

started to become an adult and started thinking in global terms
and also started thinking of what I was going to do as a career.
I had always leaned towards the science and mathematics areas,
but I was never pushed by the family in terms of what I was going
to do, except at the beginning where, I said, my father said,
"One of you a lawyer; the other a doctor." I had no interest at
all in the medical field. I just ignored that totally.

I read heavily in the fields of shipbuilding, naval

architecture, and for a while there naval architecture was sort

of my first choice. Later on, it broadened into architecture as
well as naval architecture, and for a while I gave serious
thought to architecture. But I talked to people, and, in the
first place, there was very little need for architects in those
days. Very little building going on. And so all these jobs did
not have the promise.

It was not until, really, junior college days that I really

settled that it was engineering. And for the first two years of
the college experience you do not have to make a decision about
the sub-specialties that you could go into. But the point that I
was kind of making was that I was beginning to see the world in
this whole thing, and San Francisco is such an exciting place to
live, as I ve tried to point out to you.

For example, when they had this opening of the [World s]

Fair, on Treasure Island, I knew that the place to go was
Telegraph Hill, where you could see the lights when they first
came on. I remember those days. I can even tell you walking
down the street that I was looking for a good place to stand or
sit. There was a party going on in a house at the end of the
street. Today Telegraph Hill is filled with private homes and
condos and apartments. Very wealthy people. But in those days
it was family houses. "Hey, you want to see?" So there I was,
 80

on the deck of Italian families homes, looking right out toward

Treasure Island.

Of course, the next thing you know, I was drinking wine and
eating their food, and then the lights going on. That was a
great, great thing to see. Roosevelt pressed the key in
Washington and the lights went on in San Francisco. You walked
back home through Chinatown. You would do all these kinds of
things that were so different.

Swent : You haven t mentioned the bridges.

Maslach: Well, in 1939 they were open, but they started building around
37. If you were to think how fast that was done two years.
Today it takes you two years to go through the paperwork to get a
license to do it, you know? The environmental report is a year.
These were days when everything just went! The reason the
bridges were built so fast, of course, is it s a big union town
with lots of people who knew how to do mechanical work. The
shops down south of Market were big and we could handle all those
things. We had the steel company right there. So many people
wanted to work.

You take a look at the pictures of the bridges being built.

It will always come to your mind, Look at how many people there
are working. You go out on a construction project today, you
don t see anywhere near the number of people. It has been
mechanized and a lot of machine tools and/or big equipment for
construction, which we didn t have in those days.

Swent : Your father did not belong to a union?

Maslach: No. He was not a union- type worker. He was sort of a handyman
in a variety of things.

I suddenly remembered I forgot to tell you that back there

when I was fifteen, sixteen, I went up to the Delta with the
Andrews family, and we would be on the boat, living on the boat,
and doing all kinds of swimming and sports activities and so on.
Nadine at that time was, like, seven, eight years old. I was
like the older brother, you know? We just spent an awful lot of
time together. Interesting times. I was up in that area very
recently. I m talking Walnut Grove, Locke, that area. We would
stay at Steamboat Slough, for example. Many, many small yachts
would go up there and stay the summer. Hot. Hundred-degree
temperatures. Dry. It was quite an experience. We would be up
there only two or three weeks.
 81

But when I was sixteen, I wanted to point out, that I had my

first drink in the bar of the Walnut Grove Hotel, which was one
of these big, beautiful, great hotels. The bar was, oh, fifty
feet long. The most beautiful mahogany bar you had ever seen in
your life. And there were all these big jars at the bar. The
jars contained asparagus. Big asparagus country. In the jars,
sealed, would be the prize-winning asparagus of 1932 or something
like that [chuckles]. The winner of this or that. It was
agriculture country. Very big in Asian labor, stoop labor.

Swent : Locke was all Chinese.

Maslach: All Chinese. I remember some of my Chinese schoolmates at

Galileo High, which was of course heavily Chinese and Italian in
those days. The Chinese people were working up there.

One night we went down to the hotel to have dinner. We were

entertaining a couple. I think it was Bill s cousin. We went to
Locke. I don t know if you were ever inside some of these old

buildings. This was in the heyday, in the thirties. It looks

like a theater on that levee, a sign saying "Theater." It was a
theater, but after the show was over, down below the theater was
a gambling joint. It was all Chinese gambling amongst
themselves. Of course, they would love to have the Caucasians
come in and supply more money.

But they have a game which was explained in one of the

museums up there in which basically there are a lot of markers on
the table, and they would be shuffled and all these Chinese are
just screaming at the top of their lungs and making bets with
each other and so on. You couldn t believe the bedlam. It would
just drive you nuts to stay there for a long period of time. And
all of a sudden, the man who s in charge [slapping table] just
clamps down, like, a big bowl on top of the markers and takes it
out. The whole bet is on the markers left under the bowl. It
was either one, two, three, four. You bet it in groups of four.
Okay. The zero, of course, was not the last straw. That s a
zero drawing.

Swent: Sort of like jack straws.

Maslach: No, pieces.

Swent: Oh, tiles.

Maslach: Tiles.

Swent: I see.
 82

Maslach: Not a word is spoken as he pulls out four at a time. You know,
lifts the bowl, four at a time, four at a time. You win on the
basis of one, two, three, four.

Swent : How many there are.

Maslach: Simple game. You can still hear that game in Chinatown. Every
once in a while, you can walk down Grant Avenue and then take the
side alleys. In a lot of the side alleys you can hear out there.
Even on Grant Avenue you can hear. You hear the tiles.

So here I am, sixteen years old, drinking right and left and
going to gambling joints!

Swent: You weren t gambling, though, were you?

Maslach: No. I had no money to gamble! You know, it was true also in San
Francisco. San Francisco was a wide-dpen town. Unions
controlled. You had your Irish, your Italian, you know, Chinese
sections and so on. It was kind of self-policing.

Swent: But you were wandering very freely.

Maslach: I was in the middle of the town. And I tasted all of the
different areas because I was right there. High school, I was
with Italians and Chinese; John Swett junior high school,
predominantly Japanese because that was next to Japantown. So I
mixed with everybody and anybody, you know? Some of my best
friends, one was Basque, on the other side is British; over here
was French. It was a very wonderful way to grow up, you know,
San Francisco.

As I said, because was big, I would go downtown.

I I would
be in the downtown area. And where Sutter and Stockton Street-
there s a big city garage now, ten stories highthere used to be
an old building. On the ground floor there were shops, but on
the second floor there was a nightclub-restaurant place, famous
for serving some kind of food. Let s say chicken or something
like that. But there was a big bar, and they stayed open all
night long. I mean, none of this two o clock, you know, which
was the legal limit. That place was known everywhere; you could
go there any time of day or night and get a drink. And I m
talking three or four in the morning. Every once in a while they
had a jazz group. Generally, it was just a drinking place.

Down in that mercantile area there were so many wonderful

little restaurants. I saw the Iron Pot has disappeared, but it
was one of the best places to go and have a meal. I knew these
 83

places because quite a few of them would ask my father to come

over and fix things. So I wandered. I wandered everywhere.

Swent: Do you want to follow up on Doris now at all?

Maslach: Hang on a sec. I still have a couple of thoughts still not put

together, but I thought maybe we would start with Doris and so on

in our next session.

Swent: All right.

Maslach: Because we re going to get noisier with time here.

Swent: I m afraid so, yes, yes. Okay.

Maslach: So the point that want to make is that I could just go

I

anywhere, anywhere in the city. I was living on Larkin and Eddy.

If you know San Francisco at all, this is on the edge of the
Tenderloin. And so if you walked down Turk Street or Eddy,
prostitutes would come up to you all the time. You got to know
another part of life.

I always remember just a half a block away from us, up

Larkin Street, in an old apartment house, small one, between
Ellis and Eddy, on the west side of the street one day the
police cars and a police wagon rolled up, and the police went
into this house, this apartment house. So I decided to be doing
a chore of buying some food for the family in the market, which
was right across the street from this apartment house. I was
just standing there, looking. It was a house of prostitution. I
never knew it was there. I knew the gambling joint on the
corner, but I did not know about the house of prostitution two
doors away. The madam and all the girls went into the wagon.

I recall this so vividly because two of the girls were

wearing Commerce High School senior sweaters. You know, the

senior sweater was a cardigan with an insignia of Commerce High.
Wool. Wonderful sweaters. I remember mine from Galileo; I used
it for so many years. But all of a sudden, you realize where you
were living. In this whole area.

For example, Adams School, where I went to the grade school,

would come up there and use the playground area to play handball
and so on. One day walking away from the school down the alley,
all of a sudden cases of wine and liquor were being thrown out of
the third floor or so of this club. Well, it s a great jazz
joint and rock club today in San Francisco. It s on O Farrell
Street between Polk and Market. Beautiful, beautiful club.
 In the old days, it was a club and a restaurant. I remember
going there and seeing the original Topsies. They were the
twins--! mean, the two girls who played Topsy and Eva. But it
was an illegal liquor club. There was an alleyway behind this
place and an empty lot which had a lot of groundcover and
concrete fill. The police were there and just smashing all this
champagne, scotch, bourbon. Of course, all the photographers
were there, taking pictures.

The next day I remember Michel and I going to--it stank to

high heaven of liquor--but we would go and find the bottles,
necks of the bottles, because all of the necks of the bottles
were covered with tinfoil, heavy lead foil, really. And so we
would be unwrapping these things, crunching all this broken
glass. We got out, oh, about fifty pounds of lead foil. The
next time the rags-bottles-sacks man would come around, and we
sold him lead foil. Lead foil was very valuable. You got good
money for lead foil.

Here is this great, beautiful even today--club, nightclub-

restaurant and the back side of it, Prohibition. All this
fabulous wine and champagne and scotch and what have you being
thrown out and dumped into this lot. So what was I doing the
next day? Salvaging all the lead [laughs]. I think that s kind
of a picture piece of my life.

Swent : There s always someone who benefits.

Maslach: But you were always doing these inner-city things, you know? As
1 look back on it, I realized how I grew up because I learned not
so much in school but I was learning the real nuts and bolts of
how to live, you know, right there. It was a very, very
wonderful time.

Well, I wanted to finally close this session-

Swent : Did you get good grades in school?

Maslach: I always had good grades. The reason I went to community college
rather than the university was that I had an advisor who just did
not advise. The grades were no problem. My scores on the tests
that we used to take in those daysnot SAT but, oh, Minnesota
tests, aptitude tests. There are six parts to it.

Swent : The Regents? The Regents exam?

Maslach: No, no, not a Regents. Nothing that formal. It was something
that was purchased. It was Minnesota Multiphasic Aptitude Test.
And the back side of the test there was a page for your scores.
 85

I remember going to the vice principal because I was going to

college and university, and this is the kind of advice you got.
Here was the six scores, six columns. I was up there at the
99th, 90th percentile. All the same scores. He looked at me, he
looked at the scores, he says, "You can do whatever you want."
That was the advice! What do you want to do? Just do it .I
didn t know what he was talking about, he said, "You can do
whatever you want." And that was the total of my advising.

The advisor who approved my courses made a mistake. It was

a simple mistake if you know how to read, which he didn t,
obviously, because it said you had to have two years of one
language. Well, I had one year in Spanish, and I realized that
that was not very valuable for science, and French or German
would be better, so I proposed French. He said, "Sure." So I
had one year of French and one year of Spanish. I had two years
of language, but it was not one language. I had the scores and
so on.

So--I don t know if you want to go any further. Is it still

quiet enough? Do you still have tape?

Swent : It s quiet right now. And I still have tape.

Maslach: Well, let me just kind of introduce the next stage of growing up.
This is college. Did I show you that picture?

Swent: No.

Maslach: This is kind of a better picture of my father, I thought it

captured more of his character. He s dancing with our daughter.
She was about, let s see-

Swent : She looks about eight, maybe?

Maslach: About five. And this was when we were living back East, and they
came back and visited us.

Swent: Isn t that sweet. This is Christina.

Maslach: He was a great dancer, a Polish ethnic dancer, and he would do

these costume dances, as I told you earlier, you know, in the
Polish house. You know, with great pounding of the foot on the
floor, the Krakoviak, especially. It was a very wonderful dance.
But they had all the other dances--the Polonaise and waltzes and
what have you.

Of course, in the high school period is when you, of course,

learn, amongst other things, that there are girls in this world.
 86

I was a quiet one. I would sort of sit in the back of the class
and slouched down because I was big and did not want to get
called on. I never took a book home in all my high school. I
would do all my work during the study hours or lunchtime. Stay a
little late, maybe.

Well, the different women that I met during that time were
really very interesting. Doris was one of the first. We met
there in geometry class. Mr. Bartholomew s section. But there
were other people that we met. She and I--one of her best
friends was Shirley Hicklin, who we just met and talked with and
in fact visited down in Carmel. She came from a well-to-do
family in the Pacific Heights area. What they had at Galileo
High was Pacific Heights; Marina, which was less wealthy; and
then you had North Beach and Chinatown. Those were the four
groupings that came into Galileo High.

Swent :
Interesting mix.

Maslach: A very interesting mix in those days. And then a group, in which
I put myself, that came from other parts of the city. I was
downtown. Because Galileo High was supposed to be good for
science, and that s what I wanted, okay? So there was a
sprinkling of that, but they were not a group. There were some
individuals in this whole thing. So life was dominated by these
different groups.

Doris, for example. Another very good friend of hers was

Carol Woo. She was Korean. They had a drycleaning
establishment. This was the wonderful mix that you had. Doris
Ravizza was a cheerleader, Jean Deckman, Lee Ham from the Marina
and so on. These were all people that we had in our classes. It
was a track system. Let s face it. Because we had shops there,
and a lot of people went into shops. Not too many of the Asian
and/or Italians actually were in the actual track to go to the
university. We had a lot of very good athletes there. But it was
a very metropolitan type of a system.

So my friends were friends from the area, like Michel, plus

a few others, whom I picked up from the Pacific Heights-Marina
area. I did not know too many Italian families. I knew a few
Chinese families and a few Japanese. One of the big Chinese
families had one of the big nightclubs there in Chinatown. He
stayed close to me. We were in some classes together. He would
ask me questions when the problem of language became a major
problem for him.

But one of the students we had was an older Chinese student

who was a houseboy. He was in high school to get his diploma
 87

part time. Boy--he could have been forty, for all I know. He
was one of these Chinese who lived in a little hovel in the
basement. So I learned from him what life was like for the
Chinese. 1 picked up a lot of values from both the Chinese and
Japanese, who were the ethnic minorities in those days.

I ll finish off with a couple of stories. I one time asked

Jean Deckman, who was queen of the prom--Lee Ham was the king. I
asked Jean, "Hey, what do you consider to be a good date? Give
me an idea of what you d like to do." Well, in those days, you
didn t have that much money, so she said, "Well, get a car."

Swent : So if you had a car?

Maslach: You would pick her up and you would go down into the North Beach
and you d have a meal, which is running at the most a dollar each
in 37, and then you would go lobby dancing.

Swent: Lobby dancing?

Maslach: Lobby dancing was a big thing in the thirties. We had big bands,
and we had good bands. And any hotel had a band. At the Palace
Hotel if you remember that. Remember that enormous lobby all
the way from Market Street that goes all the way through there?
Well, all you had to do was open up the door and the dancing is
inside there. But what you did was dance out in the lobby. The
manager was smart enough to know that these kids, from Pacific
Heights especially, are going to be the future generation, and so
they would roll up some of the rugs. They had a nice marble
floor to dance, and you had a band. Right there.

The owner of the Mark Hopkins, his son, Hart Smith, was in
our class in 37, Galileo High, so people would go there often.
Students were welcome there for lobby dancing. The Fairmont
lobby was enormous, but they had rugs down, so what you would do
is you took off your shoes, and it was essentially a sock hop--
you know, dancing with your shoes off in your stockings. So you
do these things. We would all go to some place and have
something to eat and so on, and then go home.

Doris went ice skating, and she was taken by a classmate who
was named Andy Benton. She was his date. And Andy asked me to
go along, so we had a threesome. Andy had a car, and we went ice
skating. Then after the ice skating--! just talked to her the
other day about this because I was reminiscing and said, Where
did we go out to eat that night?"
 88

She said, "I don t know."

I said, "After we went ice skating." We drove down to

Market Street and then we went to a Greek place up there about,
oh, 12th and Market, somewhere in that area. And we had fried
banana fritters. Just beautiful. And very Greek. You know,
with honey and so on. And wonderful Greek coffee. You know,
dark coffee, heavy coffee.

I ll finish up. We ll be thrown out in a minute. I had my

first real date, this one with Andy and Doris was of age
seventeen. But I had a crush on a girl who was a year younger, a
year behind us, and her name was Angelina Mosconos Truly Greek.
.

Little angel. Well, she was in the Spanish class. I met her
when I was a sophomore. She was on the smallish side, and then
she had a growth spurt when she was like a junior or senior, and
so she ended up--Doris and I met her years later, when we were
back here I believe it was the 1950s. -Just by chance, we went
out at the zoo. Met her and her husband and their children, and
we had our children. She was this tall beauty.

But in high school, she was this little person about five-
foot-two or -three. She had very tight black curly hair, and she
had black eyes. Very pretty face. And she was really a darling.
Everybody loved her. She had so much vitality. She was always
vibrant, always talking. She lived on Larkin Street, I walked
back home with her and so on, carried her books.

We had one great date. "Hey, let s go see Disney s big new
This was "Fantasia." It was down at the Geary Theater,
thing."

special sound and so on. Great. So I picked her up at her

house, met her parents for the first time, went to a matinee, and
she was duly impressed with my suit. So we go down there, take
the cable car, Hyde Street, practically from her house. And the
Hyde Street cable today. You can t get on it.

We went down and transferred into the second cable car that
went down O Farrell Street all the way to Market. We got off on
Powell or Mason and walked up to the Geary Theater, one block.
And we saw "Fantasia," which was fabulous! First you had to
reserve seats, so it was kind of a special thing, not like going
to a small movie house. Inside the Geary it was very, very nice.

Then we went to a place on the corner of Mason and Geary.

It was called Tiny s, Tiny s Waffle Shop. This was a branch, but
they had several. What they had was very simple: waffles. What
made it good was that they had all kinds of toppings. You even
had toppings that was like a menu for a dinner. You could have
 89

chipped beef, creamed chipped beef or even have something else

which was essentially an entree, on top of the waffle.

Of course, in the middle of the day, we would take the

toppings which were, of course, all the sweet ones. What we both
had: ice cream with fresh strawberries. It was like a
strawberry sundae on top of a waffle. The waffle is warm.

Swent : Sounds good.

Maslach: Oh! This was just wonderful. Kills your appetite for dinner
[laughs] because it was like--it was big. A waffle, a big
waffle, all those big scoops of ice cream, whipped cream and
strawberries, you know. And it was generous. It was a big
waffle. So I took her back home and said good night, goodbye.
It was actually, as I said, all in the daytime. That was a good
date, and I was out, you know, taking a girl to see "Fantasia"
and I go to Tiny s Waffle Shop, and had to ride to and from her
house on the cable car. That s a pretty good date [chuckles].

Doris and I started dating when we were in college. That

was an entirely different period of time. We ought to quit.

Swent: I think it s a good time to quit, yes. You did a good job.

Opportunities During the Great Depression

[Interview 3: September 29, 1998]

Swent: Our previous interviews were at the Faculty Club, but the noise
was a problem, so today we re in Room 406 at Cory Hall.

I thought it might be helpful if we go back a little bit.

You had gone up till the late thirties. You talked some about
Galileo High. You didn t mention your graduation. Was that an
event?

Maslach: Well, I think I should go back a little, a few steps, simply

because I recognize the same thing that you did. What I was
trying to do in my answers to your questions was very simply to
give you an overall, broad picture of society as it was in San
Francisco and society as it impinged on my life. I realized that

living in the Great Depression, many people must get the image
that we were limited in what we could do and what kind of life we
could lead. In certain ways that was true. Luxury items weren t
things that you could afford.
 90

But the availability of public activities was just enormous,

and I, by just beLng more aggressive, had developed a career in
yachting, for exanple. What you did was go down to the yacht
harbor and just hang around, and eventually a yacht owner would
recognize that there was this poor kid up there that wanted to go
sailing, and instead of just saying, "Hey, let s go sailing," he
would say, "Well, how about polishing some brass?" And so you
would work your way into the sailing opportunity. This is what I
did.

For example, not only with Bill Andrews, who I mentioned

earlier, who was a shop teacher in junior high school, but with a
famous yachtsman, Stevens, who won the big Diamond Cup in
"Pop"

the 1915 Fair. Pop s son, Dave Stevens, was a very well-known
Bay Area yachtsman, with many, many championships to his credit.
And I sailed with Pop for years, and it was just wonderful to be
able to experience that kind of life. So that there were things
you could do if you just decided you wanted to do them. Ice
skating was a big part of my life in the high school period, and,
of course, the Boy Scout work and the work up in the mountains
began at the same time.

Galileo, a High School for Science

Maslach: Getting back to the high school activity, which I seem to have
given you very short notice on, it was a high school that was
designed in the old mode of having a theme. And the theme at
Galileo was science. We had an observatory and so on. The
teaching in those days was, in my opinion, great. I had teachers
in English, mathematics, and science, chemistry, physics that
were outstanding, people that I still remember.

Swent : You had mentioned Bartholomew.

Maslach: That s where Doris and I met, in his geometry class. I don t
know if I told you the story of --in solid geometry, in senior
year, she was the only girl in the class, and she was about
fifteen, a specialized senior class. And a very difficult
problem was assigned, and she was the only one that got it. So
she was talking about it ahead of time. We always checked to see
who got what problems. And so she was called upon to put another
problem on the board, and then all the rest of the people beyond
C, Cuneo, did not have the next problem.

What I did was to rip a blank page out of my binder and walk
past her desk and took her problems and went in the back of the
 91

room and put that problem on the board. Well, of course, all the
boys in the class were booing and hissing and making noise, and
the teacher, an older man, did not understand what was going on.
Fortunately, the class ended before I had to explain the problem
[chuckles) .

Years later, when Doris and I re-met after I was in

community college- -we re-met very close to the Campanile on the
Berkeley campus. Her first comment to me was, "Who is doing your
math homework for you?" [laughter] That is something that she
still remembers to this day. Her claim was that she was afraid
that if the problem was wrong, that I would turn around and say,
"She did it."

But the teaching in English was especially good, in my mind,

in the senior year. Mrs. Metzger was outstanding, and she was
big on Shakespeare.

Swent : You had spoken about her.

Maslach: We read Shakespeare right and left, and performed and did
everything. The head of chemistry was a well-known professor of
the community college and he was also working part-time at
Galileo High. Our physics professor was an astronomer who was
the head of the big astronomy laboratory that made telescopes
here in San Francisco. He was truly, you know, a gifted person
in this regard. So we had outstanding teachers.

Swent: And you said you had an observatory at the school.

Maslach: Just a small observatory, but it was a real observatory, and you
could go and observe and so on. So the whole concept of these
specialized schools Commerce, Polytechnic, Lowell (for
academics) and Galileo (for science) --stopped about that time,
and general high schools were built after that point Lincoln,
Washington, and so on. We got away from that concept of teaching
at the high school level, specialization rather early in life.

Swent: What do you think about that?

Maslach: Well, I think it s far too early to specialize in that regard.

The concept of taking students who through some examination at
the junior high school level and think some are fit only for
working in shops and sending them to a school which was heavily
shop-oriented is a bad concept, in my opinion. Similar to the
European concept in which at about eleven years old you take an
exam that really structures the rest of your life. I have never
felt that was a good idea. Later in life, I determined that
there was an even further extension of that concept and that the
 92

real specialization really fhou.ld occur at the junior year of

college, which is essentially what we do here at Berkeley.

Getting back to the high school, there was a wonderful

mixture of multi-culturalism, to use a modern term. We had a
very large Asian population because Chinatown was one of our
biggest contributors. And then we had a very large Italian
population because we were in the North Beach. Then the
strangest group that came in third was from Pacific Heights. We
had a very wealthy operation. People like Richard Goldman, who
is known, of course, now for the Rhoda Haas and Richard Goldman
Foundation. They give these major awards on problems of
pollution and ecology in the universe here.

But there are all kinds of people that came from Pacific
Heights, who I think I might have mentioned. One of the women I
knew later married a professor here in-English. It was just a
tremendous feeling of real scholarship from the people in Pacific
Heights. They set the sort of the cultural tone, if I could put
it that way. They were the ones that were in charge of all the
literary and/or theater operations. Of course, amongst them were
some of the top scholars in the organization.

A name that should be familiar to you, Nathan.

Swent : Harriet?

Maslach: Harriet .
Well, her husband was one of my classmates in high
school.

Swent : Ed Nathan.

Maslach: Ed Nathan. So we had this combination. And I was in the fourth

group, which was the people who were not tied into any ethnic
group, just sort of generally from the rest of San Francisco. I
was living at that time down on Larkin Street. The streetcar
right past our house went directly to Galileo High and I often
would walk through Polk Gulch and that area, you know, coming or
going to the high school.

Swent : What about the Fair? The World s Fair of 39.

Maslach: Thirty-nine.

Swent : You graduated from high school in--

Maslach: Thirty-seven.

Swent :
Thirty-seven. So that was in your community college time.
 93

Maslach: Yes. Let s finish the account with the high school and the
graduation. I had plenty of buddies and so on. There was no, to
my mind, real cliquishness Some people sat in the courtyard of
.

the building; some people went to the cafeteria; some people went
over to the gym; and some people were on the south side of the
school, where there was a wall which you could hoist yourself up
on and sit, and there would be maybe a hundred people up and down
that street, sitting on that wall. People would talk to you.

There was a lot of teasing going on. I can t say flirting.

People didn t date in those days, and so it was more talking to
each other. Of course, as I said, I think the women wore a
uniform one day a week.

Swent :
No, you didn t mention that.

Maslach: Middies and long skirts. And so every Tuesday or Thursday or

something, why, all the women throughout the school were in the
identical costume. This blouse with a scarf, navy blue and so
on. And then long skirts that went practically to the ground.
They went to the ankle in those days. Yes, middies. We
recently Doris that is, had a reunion with some of her girl
,

friends of the high school. Nine of them. At the Metropolitan

Club in San Francisco. One of the women made place cards. She
made a copy of a big photograph of the entire class, and she
clipped out the individuals at that luncheon and how they were
dressed. They were all in middies. And their skirts were right
to the ground.

Swent: What did you wear? What did the boys wear?

Maslach: Oh, the boys-- jeans were never seen at that time. You did see
something that might have been a chino-type of slack; in other
words, a lower-cost slack, rather than a wool slack. And then
there were corduroys, which were used a little bit. But I think
that in general you would say that slacks were fairly common
throughout high school. Like I am dressed now.

Swent: You didn t have T-shirts in those days.

Maslach: No, no. It was pretty formal for a society. It is amazing how
kind of strict it was without any written laws or regulations; in
other words, that is the way you did it. That s all there was to
it. People did not have money, and so style was not the big
thing, unless you were in the wealthier classes. We had just a
wonderful rapport with people from all groups. I still remember
one of the Chinese students by the name of Leong. I think that
was close to it. He came from a family that was in the nightclub
business in Chinatown. He was a good athlete. We just sort of
 94

saw each other everywhere and talked to each other. We were in

the same math class, I remember. We iid problems together.

I prided myself on being able to do all my homework during

the day and not taking the books home at night. I would do that
by using the study period which we had plus the lunch time
period, so there were two hours in there that I essentially
worked onsometimes I would be with a group in the cafeteria
doing math problems or something else, and then another time I
would be somewhere else doing science problems or what have you.
But the Chinese, the Italians--! mean, some of my closest
friends, colleagues there were, you know, of these ethnic
backgrounds.

We would play ball together; we studied together; we did

homework together. We did everything. There was no social
contact in that regard, but we did have lots of contact in the
school. Compared to today and all the alarms that you read about
and so on, we had a much, much better ethnic operation.

After going to lunch and doing work and then going to the
afternoon classes, I often would go down to the yacht harbor and
hang out there and then take a streetcar home from there. So
from three to five I was down in that area.

The 1939 World s Fair and Beginning of Maturity

Maslach: The Fair started, really, or the preparations for the Fair about
1937, with the building of the bridges [Golden Gate and Bay]. I
knew people who worked on the bridges and so on, so there always
was an interesting thing for me to watch. The Fair was just a
fantastic operation. I think I told you already that one night I
decided to see the opening, and I went up on Telegraph Hill. I
was invited by the Italian family to sit with them and eat all
that fantastic food.

Swent: You had mentioned that, but you didn t say anything about going
to the Fair.

Maslach: Well, I went to the Fair because the way to go to the Fair was to
use the ferry. I took the ferry from the Ferry Building. There
was a shuttle, just constantly back and forth. So you would go
from the ferry to the west side of Treasure Island, and you would
disgorge a thousand passengers and kind of go on through
everything. I remember all kinds of separate, little aspects of
the Fair, rather than the Fair as a whole. I was very intrigued
 95

with the foreign exhibits, for example. Since I was a musician,

I also was intrigued with the musical work. They had a group
from Central America that would perform. Say, Guatemala or one
of those countries. And it was just wonderful, just to sit
there, just to listen to this music, which was so different.

think that I started to get a little international at that

I

point. Up to that point, I think I was pretty parochial from

California, but I began to understand and, of course, it came
with, as I told you, a class in civics, where we studied
essentially the Spanish Civil War, 1937. So I began to, you
know, kind of go into a new phase.

There was not the intense pressure to go to college that

there is today. To think that you could go to college and so on
for people of wealth was automatic, yes. But for anybody lower
than that, that concept of going to college was pretty big. I
was told by Bill Andrews, the shop teacher in junior high school,
that I should seriously look at a shop job because I was a good
machinist. And someone else told me something similar, you know,
later on. So we were being constantly pushed into getting a job.
Getting a job was very, very important.

Swent : From your family, you said there was pressure for college.

Maslach: Oh, yes. My father--! can still see him standing there and
telling us that we were all going to go to college. Two boys.
One will be a lawyer, and the other will be a doctor. My
brother, of course, became a lawyer. It s interesting you bring
up the question of graduation because we graduated in 1937, and
that s when the [War Memorial] Opera House was very new. We
graduated in the San Francisco Opera House. You know, cap and
gowns and so on. Doris was the salutatorian, and I was back with
all the rest of the boys [chuckles] somewhere, and we just had a
wonderful graduation. Lots of pomp and circumstance, you know,
including of course the music. But it was a large school, with a
large graduating class, and it was a major event. It of course
was reported in the newspapers and stuff like that.

I, in 37, summertime, had a job to work with the Crescent M

Camp, as 1 said. That s when I got started up in the mountains
and with the Yosemite Park and Curry Company. Incidentally,
since our last meeting, I have been up in the mountains. I

stopped in at Yosemite and spent a couple of nights in Camp

Curry, in one of those old tents.

Swent: Did you really? [chuckles]

 96

Maslach: [chuckles] They cost a lot more now than they did in those days.
But it was kind of a little deja vu, you know.

The need to get a job was part-time job or something, you

knowwas constantly there. And since we had this apartment
house down there on Larkin and Eddy Street, twenty-three
apartments, that itself was a job. My mother managed it. My
father, of course, had at least two jobs all those years. Every
once in a while, there would be an empty apartment, which was in
pretty poor condition. It was a brand-new building, but we all
in the family went and worked, peeling wallpaper, painting and
cleaning, you know. Everything. I mean, it is amazing the

things that we were able to do.

My father, of course, was an expert in this type of

activity, and 1 soon picked up a lot of that from him. As I told
you, I believe, I used to go out with him on jobs at night and
would go back home to pick up a tool that we had forgotten to
bring or something. So I got to be a pretty good maintenance
person, myself [chuckles]. In fact, last week I was up at Sea
Ranch doing maintenance on one of our big doors, which faces
south, and the windows leak because of the weathering, you know,
of the window stripping. I am replacing sixteen individual
wooden pieces on that big door. It s a lot of carpentry and--
delicate, more like cabinetry.

Swent : A useful skill to have.

Maslach: I have always done this, I have been able to maintain houses,
boats, whatever.

But think that 37 became a very, very definite turning

I
point. think
I that that is when my maturity started, age
seventeen. That may sound a little early, but I think that we
were heavily influenced by the economy of that day. We were very
sensitive to things. For example, take elections. My father
with his political activity was always in touch with people like
the Republicans. Herbert Hoover sent a note, and Franklin
Roosevelt sent a note and so onmore than one asking him to
support.

We met all these other people. Politics in kind of a vague

way, on the side, meaning the economy in a nationwide sense.
Going up to the mountains, for example, and seeing all this fruit
and vegetables in the Valley. The most beautiful stuff you have
ever seen. And you could buy a lug of tomatoes for a nickel.
And ten cents for a lug of berries or something like that. There
was distribution and not, of course, the production.
 97

Swent : Well, by 37 it was--was it turning?

Maslach: Not really. It s rather interesting that you mention that

because just the other day there was a television program, and
one of the people said something which I totally agree with and
believe in. The concept was to get out of the Depression. Well,
starting in 29 and we really did not get out of the Depression
until 39, when we were already heavily involved with war work or
the Great Britainon the Lend-Lease Program. It was cash on the
barrelhead, concepts that Roosevelt had to go with because it was
not, in 37, 38, a strong feeling within the United States to
get involved over, say, the Spanish Civil War and so on. We were
not isolationists, but we were withdrawn definitely. We had our
--we wanted to get over this Depression first. Which, of course,
was international. It was not until 39, ten years, that and
even then, one can argue, and this is what the man on the
television program said, the Depression went right to the war,
until 41. Well, I think that in 39 there was already quite a
bit of work being done for Great Britain that took the edge off
of the Depression.
 98

II SAN FRANCISCO JUNIOR COLLEGE AND THE UNIVERSITY OF

CALIFORNIA, 1937-1942

San Francisco Junior College, 1937

Maslach: But I went to junior college and one of the things that you
should note is that historically we have another big red star for
1937. Nineteen thirty-seven is when President Robert Gordon
Sproul established the liaison committee organization, which is
many liaison committees, really. But the liaison committee, to
articulate with the community colleges and the state colleges.
Thirty-seven was when Sproul did it.

Swent : And he was president of the university.

Maslach: President of UC Berkeley. And that was a major change because

now you could go to community colleges for two years and if the
community college was, quote, "accredited," unquote, by the
university s liaison work, why, then you could transfer to UC
Berkeley.

Swent: Before that you had not been able to do that?

Maslach: Not easily. And the ruling was very simple, and that is if you
were eligible to go to Berkeley from high school, then you could
transfer, as long as you had a C average at the community
college. But if you had a deficiency, scholastic deficiency that
kept you from Berkeley as a freshman, then you had to get a C+
average. My deficiency was, as I told you earlier, the two
different languages, one year each. So I went and took French at
the community college plus the math, physics--the common lower
division, is what we called it--and engineering at that time.

Swent: What was the name of the college?

Maslach: That was San Francisco Junior College at that time. Today, of
course, it is San Francisco Community College. It was, again, a
 99

new way to kind of thrust me into the world. They had no campus
in 37. They used what was then the UC Berkeley Extension
building on Powell Street, just half a block north of Sutter,
just on the slopes of Nob Hill. There were classrooms there for
the morning sessions. And then in the afternoon we used Galileo
High, so I did not in the afternoon move out of high school; I
was in the same building!

Of course, you would go from downtown San Francisco to

Galileo High by just walking down to Stockton Street, picking up
the F car, and that deposited you right in the doorstep of
Galileo High.

Swent : What about the students? Were they all full-time students, or
were there part-time students?

Maslach: The students that I knew were full-time. I did it in a two-year

period, actually two and a half years, "because 1 worked as well
part of the time, so 1 did not do the straight two years in two
years .

Swent: So it was possible to go part-time.

Maslach: So there was some part-time. Oh, yes. It was always possible.
But, as I said, I met half a dozen or more, maybe ten students,
very much like me and doing the same thing, planning to go to
Berkeley. Some of them, for example, went with me to Berkeley
later and then, in the first semester, I remember, I commuted
using the F train from San Francisco, Bay Area Rapid Transit. It
took us over here to the Berkeley campus.

There were two train systems, actually. There was the Bay
Area Rapid Transit system, plus the SP system. They had the big
red cars. These were big, old-fashioned railroad cars, full-size
railroad cars. Heavy, big. And they ran up Shattuck Avenue.

Swent: Did they call it Bay Area Rapid Transit at that time?

Maslach: No, it was not BART. It was something else [Key System]. I
should not have used that. But basically, as I listen to the
discussion that we should have trains on the bridge-- [chuckles]

Swent: Talk about deja vu!

Maslach: We used to have trains on the bridge.

Swent: Yes.
 100

Maslach: The upper deck was three lanes of cars each way and then the
lower deck was two train tracks and then three lanes or four
lanes--four lanes--for trucks. It was an entirely different kind
of bridge arrangement in those days.

Swent : Were there--! m trying to think, comparing now with community

colleges. They have so many returning students, lots of older
people, even my age, going to community college. Was that
something then?

Maslach: Well, in the days when I went, in the thirties, and when John
Whinnery, I think I mentioned, also wenthe was a graduate of
Modesto Community College and became dean here before I was. A
very honored man in his profession. He and I, 1 think,
epitomized this movement upward of a people trying to get a leg
up in the economy. It should be noted that--

Maslach: Engineering has always been known as the professional career

that has the largest number of people who have moved up from one
level to an academic, professional level, as compared to law,
medicine, or business, which are the other three major
professional areas. Engineering always attracted people who had
a background of doing something. For example, one of the common
questions always was for electrical engineering students, "Were
you a ham radio fan or operator?" You know, they would ask you
these questions. "Did you have hobbies?" "Did you make things?"
And so on. And that was supposed to be the concept of
engineering. You had to use your hands as well as your head. I
don t think that s nearly as common today, but in those days it
definitely was .

So community colleges I don t think were as organized as

they are today. Later on, as I got to know much more about
community colleges, I realized that they had an enormous range of
function. The first function, of course, is to get people for
the two years and award the Associate of Arts degree. With that
degree, you transfer. That is one kind of theme of the community
colleges .

But when I went around to community colleges, I found that

half of the students were at night time, part-time, and also not
degree-oriented, and taking courses for very specific subjects
and so on. It was not a remedial thing as it was a continuing
thing, a need to learn more about a certain area, in part like an
extension operation. As one student one time told me, he said,
"Like high school with ashtrays." [laughter] I always thought
that that connotated the adultness of the whole thing.
 101

Swent : Was there any particular trend towards going into teaching? Was
there teacher preparation?

Maslach: No, because in the state of California we have the enormous

organization of the state college system. The state colleges--
when 1 was back there in the thirties they were called teacher s
colleges. Their primary purpose was for teacher development, and
so San Francisco had a state college off Market Street, on the
north side of the street. That was very well known. Pretty good
size, incidentally. It was not a small operation. So we had the
university, we had the state colleges, and the community
colleges .

And Sproul, in his vision, thought that- you could articulate

transfers all the way through. And this was a wonderful idea.
Today I find throughout the world that it is still not recognized
and appreciated. I give speeches even, today on the California

system, which has these three levels, and the secret being that
you can move from one level to the other. You take Europe, for
example, which I know best. This is so contradictory to their
system that it s just very difficult for them to make that kind
of a change.

Swent :
They don t interlock them there.

Maslach: That s right.

Swent: The way we do here.

Maslach: Yes.

Swent : How about the caliber of their teaching? What about the
teachers?

Maslach: Well, the Depression days, the teachers were excellent.

Everybody tried harder, I think [chuckles]. They knew they had
to hold that job, and to hold that job they had to be good. I
remember a teacher that taught some of the basic engineering
courses that we still have but not everybody takes was truly a
good engineer. And the man that taught surveying, Professor
Jacob, he was a famous surveyor and did much of the surveying
work for the Golden Gate Bridge, so he would bring examples right
from the field. So we really had very good teachers. I must say
that I never, never faulted the teachers in my career, never.

I, of course, was in that morning group, going downtown,

even though I lived near downtown. I was in the downtown area, a
very sophisticated kind of new world, which you lived in all
 102

morning. And you would go down and have coffee at Foster s and
so on. You just kind of became part of old San Francisco.

Swent: What were you studying? What courses did you take in community
college?

Maslach: The engineering common and lower division is heavy on

mathematics, chemistry, physics, and then you must take a certain
number of social, humanistic courses. And I had to make up my
deficiency in language. And then there were engineering courses
like surveying, and there was one in staticsmechanics,
basically. And there was a basic course in electrical
engineering, AC/DC circuits, which is sort of out of the picture
now, different entirely. But the math, chemistry, and physics
was the big push.

Swent: Were you beginning to get a sense of where your future was?

Maslach: I have pondered this question many times, and not in just

preparation for this interviewing. But at some point, and

obviously it was after 37 and it s probably closer to 42, when
I graduated from UC Berkeley, and that is that I made a decision
that the thing to do was to change your career or activity every
ten years. I just set down that as a kind of a general goal.
And if you look back on what I did, influenced, of course, by the
fact that we had a war and all that, and a cold war, I
essentially lived up to that schedule very carefully: nine years
here, eleven years there, and so--and so a forty-year career,
from graduation from college to roughly 65, there it is: four
separate activities. And I know I made that decision before I
went to MIT during World War II.

Swent: Of course, a lot of the things didn t even exist at that time.

Maslach: Such as?

Swent: Well, the kinds of engineering.

Maslach: Oh, yes.

Swent: Things that came later weren t even around then.

Maslach: I agree totally on that. Everything has changed so radically,

especially in electricalelectronics area.

Swent: Yes.

Maslach: You just can t gauge. You cannot compare the academic work--
 103

Swent : But you had to have the preparation.

Maslach: Well, that s why the heavy--

Swent: The background.

Maslach: Math, physics, chemistry. 1 mean, you had four semesters of

mathematics in five-unit courses. Two of chemistry, five-unit
courses. Four of physics in four-unit courses. These were
semester units. I mean, that s a heck of a lot of work. And
that dominated, basically, your curriculum.

But getting back to the more social things, the living was
rather nice and easy in the sense that I was up in the mountains,
developing that activity, and then, of course, during the.
academic year, I would be down at yacht harbor still [chuckles].

Swent: You were living at home.

Maslach: I was living at home while in the community college. I got jobs,
not only the summer jobs but, later on, working as a laborer
through the union. Barrett and Hilp was the construction company
that I worked for.

Swent: And what did you do for them?

Maslach: Well, that wasn t until, oh, 40, 41, so I ll reserve that for
later on. But job orientation was a constant thing. You always
had someone on the lookout for--I never actually applied for a
job anywhere. I never did. I always had the jobs offered to me,
and I was very, very fortunate in that regard.

Swent: Let me throw something in. This may be appropriate. I just

finished reading a Commonwealth Club speech. I don t go often,
but I read their transcripts. This one was about jobs and work.
And this man pointed out that we now speak of having a job or
somebody will say, "That s my job" or "That s not my job,"
whereas we used to say "You do a job." He pointed this out as
kind of a profound difference that people used to think more in
terms of doing a job.

Maslach- In other words, performing on the one hand--

Swent: And the whole--

Maslach: --and the other is the concept of "I own this job."

Swent: Responsibility for the whole in other words, that your job was
not only just to--this particular act but also to please the
 104

customers or satisfy the clients or whatever, I thought it was

interesting.

Maslach: I think there is something to that. Again, I fall back on my

primary observation of the changes in our society being oriented
to the and responsive to--the great increase in population. As
I told you, compared to when I was born, we re eleven times

larger here in California.

Swent : That s a profound difference.

Maslach: It makes a profound difference. It s hard for me to still

remember--! have to force myself to think back. I do have an
excellent memory, in technicolor, but I can remember in the
Sunset district there were no houses from about 10th Avenue to
48th, 50th, the Great Highway. So you re talking about four
miles of a city which is seven miles by seven miles one whole
quadrant of that city was empty. It was sand dunes. And part of
the Richmond, on the north side, was that way. Many, many empty
lots and so on. We did not have that feeling of being crowded.
In fact, to take the streetcar from downtown San Francisco out to
Stern Grove to listen to music or opera, that streetcar was going
at high speed through truck farm areas and so on. We finally
ended up at Stern Grove. Today, Stern Grove--you think of it as
just right next door to downtown.

Swent: Yes.

Maslach: So the whole feeling of easy living, not forced living. Forced
living only in terms of economics. I mean, twenty-five cents got

you into a second-rate motion picture house, fifty cents a good

one. Go to Des Alpes up there, Broadway, and you can get a meal:
fifty, sixty cents. Dinner. These were the kinds of things you
did when you got small amounts of money, but you were not pushed.
You were not rushed. So an entirely different kind of living, in
my opinion, than it is today. Much more hyperkinetic today, much
more interest in improving oneself in many, many different ways.

I must admit I m part of it because I tell my children, "You

cannot rely just on a salary today. You have to have
investments." Every one of them, of course, is involved with
investments, as well as their regular work and activity. But we
didn t even think that way in those days. Who would put money in
the stock market after 1929?

I mean, forget it! [laughter] That was the days when you
put the money under the mattress and forget the banks, which were
failing right and left.
 105

Swent : But home ownership was important.

Maslach: Home ownership was always big. I think that we have to recognize
that that period was sort of the peak of the concept which was
brought over from Europe. The migration then was from Europe.
It was not from Asia. Chinatown was small; Japantown was even
smaller. Filipino and other populations were practically non
existent. As I told you, there were no blacks until the war in
the state of California.

So kind of a strange thing to recount now because it all

sounds as though it s a foreign environment. In many respects,
it was foreign, compared to now.

Swent: But all the more reason to document it. It s valuable to

remember.

Maslach: Well, I m spending too much time, maybe, on this concept of the
living of that period because, to me, it was a major thing; it
really was.

Swent : There has been such a difference.

Maslach: Yes. Well, in 37, going to community college and being a galley
slave in the afternoon, doing these things, going to the yacht
harbor, sailing and racing, that was my life. And it was a
pretty good life [chuckles].

Swent : It sounds wonderful.

Maslach: I went skiing. I picked up skiing starting in 37. I happened

to be on a trip up in the mountains. It was a Boy Scout venture.
I was given a pair of old skis, one of which was partly split in
the heel. I learned to ski and learned to love it, and so I
started skiing.

Swent : Where did you ski?

Maslach: Donner Summit, basically. The train would take you up there, and
the highway, of course, was there, but it was small, compared to
the train. You could get off at Strawberry and other places
along the line. Donner was a spot. Norden, I don t think, had a
train station. It may have, but I don t remember going there by
the train.

Swent: Did they have tows?

Maslach: They did have rope tows, but pretty primitive. Most of it was
essentially cross-country skiing, going up the hill and then
 106

coming down on your own. It wasn t until after the war that the
big tows started to sprout up. But it was a new introduction to
a new phase of living. I must say that I admired it.

Not too much happened, of course, in those days. It was

sort of high school continued, as I said, with ashtrays. But "39

I think is sort of a crucial year, not only because of the

bridges and also the Fair and I did go to the Fair often, simply
just to wander around. It was sort of like going to Golden Gate
Park, only much more sophisticated, with nightclubs and places to
eat and so on. In fact, I went to Sally Rand s Nude Ranch.

Swent: Oh, did you?

Maslach: Even though I was not of proper age. I always thought that was a
hilarious thing.

Swent: Was that part of the Fair?

Maslach: Oh, yes!

Swent: Nude Ranch.

Maslach: Nude Ranch, right. So anyway, it was exposure to soft porn

[chuckles] .

Swent: It probably wouldn t seem so shocking today [chuckles],

Maslach: Today it would not be shocking at all.

Swent: I had forgotten about Sally Rand.

Maslach: She was famous for her feathers and feather dance.

Swent: Fan dance.

Maslach: Fan dance. That s what it was, that s right.

Swent: I had forgotten all about that.

Maslach: But it was quite a time. That and, of course, going down to the
Blackhawk every once in a while, to Hayes Street and hear the
jazz. I lived a pretty good life during that time.

Swent: It sounds wonderful.

Maslach: During that time, I discovered a new library in the Civic Center,
which is just a few blocks from our apartment house in San
Francisco. We have the Opera House and the Veterans Memorial
 107

building put up. The Veterans Memorial, on its top floor top
two floors, actuallyhad a museum of modern art. Way back. And
in the museum of modern artand it was open nights till about
ten o clock there was a library. It was one of the great
libraries and, for me, a wonderful library because for the first
time I saw- -this was 37 to 40, you knowI saw books on art,
architecture, even history, you know, because the art was never
so narrow as to be limited to just the Impressionists. It showed
the historical breadth. In many respects, that s where I picked
up art. Even though I had had music for many years, I never had
that kind of concept, except going to museums as a kid.

But would go down there and that library was open on

I

Monday nights, I remember. It may not have been open every

night, but certainly it was open Monday nights. And I would go
down there and just live in that library. All the books were so
valuable, these art books, that they were not on loan. You just
had to use them and see them right there. So I would go down
there often, right after dinner, and just stay until about ten
o clock.

Of course, the periodical room in the main library. I used

to use that a lot. I was a voracious reader. I just read
everything I could read. I was never limited. Every time I
could see a new area, I would start in and I would read deeply in
these different areas. This is one of the things that I did in
the period.

Of course, at the same time, we also had our Sea Scouts. My

brother and I decided that the Explorer Scouts were just limited,
and getting up mountains was a little bit of a chore unless you
had transportation and we didn t so we got a boat donated to
us, and we remodeled the whole thing and made that period,
essentially from age sixteen on through to twenty-

Swent : Wait a second, [interruption] I think it s gone now. It was a

trolley.

Maslach: This room is right opposite the

Swent : That s okay. It was just a cart going by with something on it, I
think.

Maslach: Anyway, getting back to living. So many different things to do,

you know? It came around to the point where I was now
transferring over to the big UC at Berkeley, and it was an
entirely different life. I kind of slipped into it by steps.

Swent: Now, this is in 1940?

 108

Mz.slach: Thirty-nine-and-a-half . The beginning of 1940, January of 40.

Father s Help for Polish Refugees

Swent : Were there intimations of the war by then?

Maslach: Oh, yes, intimations of the war. And the Spanish Civil War, of
course, by that time was pretty well over, but the --remember,
there were all kinds of invasions other than the Spanish Civil
War. We had Abyssinia (Ethiopia today), the Italians, Libya and
so on. So there were just all kinds of movements. Of course,
the League of Nations and Switzerland was the scene of many, many
horrible speeches--Mussolini and others, you know. Of course,
Hitler was right up there in 1940.

Swent : I was wondering if you had any sense of--

Maslach: Thirty-nine .

Swent :
--refugees coming in?

Maslach: Yes, I was just going to say. The fall of 39 was the invasion
of Poland.

Swent : That s right.

Maslach: So that war--

Swent : You must have known about this.

Maslach: Yes, oh, yes. We were heavily involved in that for a while. My
father was helping in the refugee program.

Swent : Were there many Polish refugees who came to San Francisco? Or
that you were aware of?

Maslach: Well, 1 remember easily twenty, of that order. One of themthe

Lubermirski family--my father was most proud of. It s a couple
that he brought here, essentially the royal family of Poland.
They were descendants of the last kings of Poland. They were the
highest level of society in that time. When my father died many
years later, why, he had buried with him the gold cross from
Poland, the highest level civilian medal that was given by the
Polish government. It was from, of course, the Polish government
in exile at that time.
 109

So we were involved in the refugee thing, but it was always

sort of a surreptitious thing. It was always cloak and dagger.
My father wouldn t say anything and then all of a sudden, someone
would appear, you know, who was from Poland. There was this
successful arrangement. How they came out, I don t know. I
never did question my father on the details of this, but as I
said, he was such a big name in the Polish community, Slavic
community as well, but he kept pretty quiet on all of that.

Swent : Do you know what this award was for?

Maslach: For his work in getting refugees out of Poland.

Swent : With the refugees.

Maslach: Yes, it was totally for the refugees. So, yes, starting in 39,
why--maybe even earlierwe had contact with the refugee problem
in Europe.

Taking the Cuneo Family to Vosemite

Maslach: In 1940, as I said, I came to Berkeley, and I met Doris again

fairly soon after I got here. I was still commuting. She

learned about my working up in Yosemite, and she said, "You know,
I ve never been to Yosemite, and my family has never been to

Yosemite." And "Would you take us up and show us Yosemite?"

And I said, don t care to go to the Valley." Even in

"I

those days, when it was fairly free, I felt that it was too
crowded [laughs]. The net result was the summer of 40 I took
some time off, and I went up to Yosemite Valley with her father
and her sister. Her brother did not come; he was doing something
else .

And so the three of them and me just--I was sort of the tour
guide. That was the year when I took her and Barbara to the top
of Half Dome on a one-day trip.

Swent: Barbara is her sister?

Maslach: Sister. We started early in the morning. I had a small pack

with lunch and so on. Unfortunately, they did not have good
shoes. They were using saddle shoes, which were rather common in
those days for everything. But we got up to the top. Even
though the cables were down, flat the last thousand feet, you
have these cables, which are usually at waist height, and you can
 110

just help yourself, guide yourself up to the top. So we would

have to pick up the cables when we wanted them. They were half-
inch steel.

So we got up there, and we were there for a very short time

because I could see a big thunderstorm coming, and the thought of
being on those cables, which are nothing else than a thousand-
foot lightning rod, you know- -so we got out of there and got down
below. We talked, of course, with the people who were putting
the cables up to waist height. They had stopped working because
of the danger, as well.

So anyway, we got back and we had this wonderful trip in the

summer of 19AO. That s when France fell. It s amazing how long
we delayed getting into the war. It wasn t until December 7th of
1941. It was another eighteen months.

Swent :
Well, there was a very strong anti-involvement feeling.

Maslach: Oh, yes. The anti-involvement--primarily the Republican branch

of the government. Taft, of course, being the biggest name that
I can remember, but there was another man equally--

Swent :
Lindbergh?

Maslach: Oh, Lindbergh s situation had come about. He was for Germany,
yes. So anyway, my internationalism has gone up step by step
because I could see--we were in a Depression. I could see that
the Depression was worldwide and I could see that we were going
to go to war. I knew that from the civics class in 37, and here
we are now up to and the
"40 war is coming towards us at speed.
It was really moving. And we were not part of it, except for
Lend-Lease and that sort of stuff, selling war goods to England.

The University of California, 1940, a Different Level of

Education

Maslach: The change from the community college to the real university was
very, very obvious to me. You cannot go to a class, which I did
in that first year, first six months, in the Hearst Mining
Building and not understand the concept of the University, the
tradition. In those days, we still had coal stoves in the
offices of the professors, and down on the first floor would be
this row of coal scuttles the professor would pick up and take to
his office. And so this was the thirties, 1940.
 Ill

And when you saw a professor s office, when the door was
open and you looked in there, why, this was all wood panels, oak,
with a fireplace. If you look at Hearst Mining over here, why,
you see all those chimneys. That s what they are. And the
offices of the professor opened onto the rooms where the lectures
were given. So you would come in as a student. The doors were
closed, and you would wait a while and then this door would open
and in walked the professor. So you really had a kind of a
British higher education view right there in that building.

Then you would go to a modern building which had just been

finished, McLaughlin Hall, and the rooms were entirely different.
They were very, very standardized. Small.

Swent :
McLaughlin wasn t calledwhat was it called at that time?

Maslach: It was just called Engineering, the Engineering Building. I

still want to point out that I was very impressed right away with
not just the teaching level, good teachers which we had in the
community college, but there was sort of a patina, a tradition
that was on this level which was different. This was the
university, and you were a university student.

In those days, we were just kind of running out the end of

the tradition which died in World War II of having Engineers Day.
Engineers Day was Washington s Birthday; he was the first
engineer in our tradition. [On] Engineers Day this campus closed
down. You could go to the archives in the main library and take
a look at the pictures of what they had. We had an enormous
parade--

Swent : You were just talking about Engineers Day at the university.

Maslach: Well, they had this day which truly shut down the university.
There was this parade. There were floats, there were sporting
events, including mud fights--

Swent : I have heard about the mud fights.

Maslach: Well, the mud fight was always down there where now -the public
health building is, down the lower end of the campus, below
agriculture. Well, what they would do is just flood that field
down there with fire hoses. Then they would have tug-of-wars,
which was the most common thing. There would be teams from
different classes or parts of the university. It was essentially
like a big county fair, you know, with all kinds of things going
on. In those days, of course, the engineers were known as beer
 112

drinkers. There was always beer around [chuckles]. This was a

campus- -there was no drinking. Alcohol-free. But there were all
kinds of places to hide these parties.

Hearst Miningit was the mining students who would be the

epitome of the engineering student, the big raw-boned guys and so
on, you know. We had all these cartoons by Rube Goldberg, who
was a student here [chuckles]. His cartoons were in the Student
Union. In fact, I remember not just the cartoons but there was a
statue that he had carved. Rube Goldberg was big in those days.

Swent : He was much earlier, though.

Maslach: Oh, he was earlier as a student. But my point was that his
tradition lived on with his cartoons and so on.

But you soon realized that you were not dealing with school
teachers; you were dealing with professors. They became a big
difference. One of the first courses I took was a thermodynamics
course; then, in those days, 105A, the first course in the junior
year. I had had a thermodynamics course over in community

college, which was not a rigorous course but fairly good. And so
when the first midterm was given early on, he wanted to sort of
judge the class. He gave a quiz. It was mostly physics,
mathematics and some thermodynamics. I think it was about the
second or third week of class. Well, I finished the thing in
half an hour, and I m sitting there. I was up in front. I
reviewed everything and checked everything. Finally I just got
tired. I got up and walked. So he looked at me and pointed to
the chair, so I sat down [chuckles] again. He went through my
exam and just graded it. Put on the top and handed it back
"100"

to me .

Swent: Before the exam period was even over!

Maslach: Over. And so he says, "Come to my office hour." I didn t know

what the heck this meant. Here I am, brand new, no friends in
this big campus--or a few that came with me from community
college, but, you knowso the next day I went to his office
hour. He said, "Where did you take thermodynamics?"

I said, "I came from the community college and we had this
course," and I described the course.

He said, "What was the text?" I pointed right behind his

head, the book [chuckles] on his shelf. I said, "Right there."

He turned around, "Oh, yes." He went through it and so on

and just told me he d give me a pass or whatever it was. I don t
 113

even remember. And to go take 105B. Right away, I got a pass on

105A. I shouldn t have taken the pass. I should have stayed
with the course because some basic thermodynamics is not my
strongest field. I felt that I could have learned something, but
I would have had to go through a lot of boring sessions. But
anyway, I skipped 105A and went on to 105B.

A Combined Mechanics Course with Professor DeGarmo

Maslach: The other thing I was taking that first semester was a six-unit
course five units, really, I think--but it combined two courses.
Mechanics is divided into statics and dynamics. So these two
courses, the junior year first semester and second semester, have
a combined course. They also have a combined course in 105A and
B, but they didn t allow people to take those two combined
courses at one time. It was just too heavy a load.

I was taking this combined course in what was then 102A-B.

The professor was a man by the name of E. Paul DeGarmo,
industrial engineering.

Swent : DeGarmo?

Maslach: D-e --that s a famous Irish name--G-a-r-m-o. He taught more like

a schoolteacher than a professor [chuckles]. He assigned
problems to be put on the board and stuff like that. This was a
wonderful class. Again, an introduction to the university.
Because I then learned about sports in the university because I
came into the class. I used to sit on the side and lean against
the side wall you know, slouch. And one day this great big guy
came up to me, and he said, "Do
you mind if I sit there?" I
said, "No, no." He sat down. It was Bob Reinhard, who was a
famous football star. Went on to pro football, with a great
career in pro football. And another student, who was the
opposing tackle on the other side of the line Bob Herrerowas
also in the class. So here we had an engineering class with two
top athletes. They used to just go to sleep because they were so
tired from practicing and so on. They were full-time students,
and this was not an easy major. And so I used to sit right next
to Reinhard.

One day DeGarmo came into the class and there were some
people behind me who were talking, and they continued talking
while he tried to start the class. He had this volatile temper.
He just sort of a black Irishman. He just said something like,
He pointed.
"YOU!" "PUT THAT PROBLEM ON THE BOARD!" I realized
 114

he was pointing at me I looked around.

! No one else was getting
up. And so I m a feisty person, or was even in those days. I
just went up--I took my book and I just went up to the board.

He says, "You can use your paper."

I said, can do this problem with just the book."

"I I made
some sarcastic, slurring tone in my voice [chuckles]. He glared
at me. And I went up and I put the problem on the board. It was
a very simple problem, really. And I sat down. That was kind of
a first contact with him. Sort of jumping ahead a little, there
was always a continual contact, but looking ahead, he was a
professor here when I became dean many years later [chuckles].
It s sort of odd to have that concept many years later. But he
liked me in his gruff way, and I got an A in the course. No
problems .

The next semester I was sitting with a bunch of guys on the

engineering courtyard, which is bounded by the engineering
building, now McLaughlin Hall, and [what] was the mechanics
building; the yellow brick building has been destroyed and was
essentially where the Bechtel Student Center is now in part and
in part where the civil engineering building is, Davis Hall. So
I m sitting there with a couple of guys, talking. DeGarmo comes
out of the building, and he has some young woman next to him, and
I looked around. He sees me and he barks in his usual style,
"MASLACH!" I didn t have a class. What does he want me for? He
introduced me to this young woman, who had had a very disastrous
first midterm in his class, statics and dynamics. And he said,
"She needs some help. Why don t you tutor her?" And he just
walks away.

A Successful Stint as a Tutor

Maslach: So here I am [chuckles] with this young woman, who came from
Pebble Beach. I mention this especially because there were
practically no women in engineering. And here there is a rather
attractive young woman, very well dressed. I always remember her
clothes--! mean, like, wool skirts and cashmere sweaters and
stuff, you know [chuckles]. I said, "What s the problem?" And
so she gave me this midterm, which shows an F. I looked at the
thing, and I said, "Oh, Thursday is my day off." She didn t have
classes, either. We either had Tuesday, Thursday, hour-and-a-
half classes or Monday, Wednesday for one-hour classes. So I
said, "Okay." This was Wednesday. "What time can we get
together? Where should we get together?"
 115

We wanted a quiet plrce, like you and I want a quiet place

[chuckles), and we ended up in using the mechanics building
laboratories. They had tables for the afternoon experiments, and
if some experiment isn t being used, why, there s a table empty
with chairs and so on, so we d be in the laboratory there. The
library you couldn t talk, so you couldn t go to the library.
So for the rest of that semester I tutored her.

Swent : What was her name?

Maslach: I can t remember. I really can t. Betty. Yes, Betty, Betty.

She was in engineering because her father had been an engineer,
and then a lawyer, a patent attorney. Very wealthy. Lived in
Pebble Beach. And he vowed to have one of his children to be an
engineer. He only had one child, who was a daughter, and so he
forced her into engineering. She was a good science/math student
so, you know, in those days I guess made sense, but not
it"

really. Anyway, she finished in engineering. But she had some

boyfriend back in Pebble Beach area, so it was never anything
romantic .

Tutoring didn t take much time or anything. I learned very

quickly--! guess this was my first experience with teaching. I

learned very quickly that her problem was not understanding the
material. She showed me problem sets and other stuff, and she
understood the material. That was not the problem. The problem
was she did not know how to take a test, and this is a problem
that is common even now with very many, many students. Even when
I was teaching, in the beginning, in the early fifties, I
remember students that were just petrified of tests.
Perspiration was pouring off of them. People were just shivering
and so on. So it was a real problem you have to try to get
around, so there are different ways of testing.

One day we were there in the mechanics building, and I said,

"Im going to give you a pop quiz." I said, problem so-and-
"Do

so." Out of the book, you know. She takes a piece of paper and
then she starts right away. I grabbed the pencil out of her
hand. "Read"--"RTP, RTF!" She "What?" "Read the Problem." So
I shoved the book at her and made her read it and re-read it.
She had a general idea. Do you think this is a problem you kind
of know how to do? What approach are you going to use? And so
on.

I remember this solid geometry class, where I took Doris s

paper in high school. The teacher there said once that if you re
taking a test that if you have five minutes to do a problem,
spend two minutes to three minutes reading the problem and
analyzing the problem, and then do it I kind of gave her the
.
 116

same lecture, and maybe even used his words in this whole thing.
But she simply would go rushing into the problems. So I gave her
a course on how to take a test, basically. And I went back to
the original F midterm, and I said, "Okay, let s take these pages
and let s start in there. What do you do?"

"Read the problems."

"You read them all?"

And you jotted down on the edges, maybe, some notes on what
to do. But you read all of them. And then you did the problem
that you knew you could do easily and then the next one and the
next one, leaving the toughest problems for the end. And so I
think I spent maybe half a dozen weeks there, four or five weeks,
just teaching how to take a test. And I remember that she had an
exam on a Monday, another midterm, same class. And so we got
together, oh, I don t know when, Thursday we did, I know. She
asked me to go over the course for her. 1 said, "Sure." So 1
did. At the end, I wrote out some problems, gave it to her,
said, "Okay, here s your exam." [chuckles]

I went through the material in the sense of what were the

fundamentals in each section. How many fundamentals are there?
What kind of problems do these fundamentals apply to? You know,
just kind of stripped the course to the bare bones. So she knew
what I meant, and she read the problems, jotted down, and took
the quiz which I made up, and she did very well. The upshot was
the next Wednesday, when she got her quiz back she came flying
out of the engineering building, holding up the paper and showing
it to me.

I was standing there with a bunch of my friends, all of us

had taken the course, so we were all talking to each other and
looking at this test, how well she had done. She got an A. On
the top, DeGarmo had written, "Nice recovery." [laughs] So that
was my first teaching experience [chuckles]. She went on for the
rest of the term. We met once a week for an hour or two and just
went over the material. She was really an interesting young
woman. Very quiet. She I think had a dominating father who
pushed her into engineering and so on. She eventually married.
I met the guy, I think, on a football day or something like that.
But he was older than she was. He had been sort of a high school
football hero and everything else, and he went on to law. He was
years ahead of her, but she knew him because they both belonged
to the country club down there, Pebble Beach, so they saw each
other all the time. I often wonder whatever happened to her

engineering career.
 117

Swent : You do wonder.

Maslach: She was a very, very interesting person. Always perfectly

groomed. Hair was just well done, you know, and clothes were
obviously not made to order but high quality clothing. She stood
out in this group.

Swent: It must have been very gratifying to you.

Maslach: Well, I mention it at length mainly because I think in my

thinking about teaching and so on and university career as
professor, that was my first experience.

What has happened from then on was that I became acquainted

with professors and courses. Ray Martinelli was a wonderful
professor of thermodynamics and heat transfer. He died following
World War II from leukemia, a problem which obviously could be
traced to the fact that he was doingwith his friend Earl
Morrin, also an excellent heat transfer manthey were doing
research on molten metal and heat transfer. Beryllium was the
material, and today it is known to be horribly toxic, so there s
all kinds of evidence, pointing back to both of these people
dying of leukemia and so on.

Laboratory Assistant to Professor Richard Folsom

Maslach: But also a professor of fluid mechanics and heat transfer well ,

fluid mechanics primarily Dick Folsom. He seemed to gravitate

towards me and I towards him. We seemed to have common
backgrounds in a variety of ways. He came from Caltech
[California Institute of Technology], where he had his Ph.D. He
was an All-American for that level of football, not the top
schools like USC and Berkeley but for the smaller schools, such
as Caltech. He was a lineman in football. He was one of my
professors, and we got to know each other. He had a liking for
the Sierras and stuff like that.

Anyway, he asked me to do some laboratory research assistant

work in my senior year. This was my first touch with research
and my first contact with the war because the research was on a
landing craft which was designed by Roebling, the famous Roebling
Company that makes steel cables. Mr. Roebling had designed this
craft, which was like a large bathtub, and then it had a set of
what are called grousers, on a belt. And so essentially it was
like a tank, but instead of just the flat tank pads, there would
be, like, Pelton water wheel scoops that would catch the water
 118

and move the craft forward. It was a rather elementary device.

You saw pictures of them doing landings in Normandy and stuff
like that, but there were other kinds of craft developed later on
which were more seaworthy, better.

But in 1941, why, I remember spending a good part of

Christmas Day and the day after and so on testing this at the
towing tank, which was at the College Avenue Pool. The basis of
the reason for the pool is that that was the ruins of the Hearst
Gymnasium for Women; this big wood structure had burned down, and
the pool was still there, so we used it for experiments in fluid
mechanics, pumping equipment, and stuff like that. It is no
longer there. In fact, where it was is where the architecture/
city and regional planning building is. College of Environmental
Design. [Wurster Hall]

But anyway, I started working as a research assistant, as a

senior. That s a little unusual. So I just kept going, and the
next thing you know, Mike O Brien, who later became dean and was
also one of my professors, had me carrying out research
experiments on pump development, deep well pumps for pumping
water out of the water table up to the surface and were very
popular. The Pomona Pump Company was the big manufacturer at
that time.

Of course, our water level went from something like ten,

twenty feet to a hundred and twenty feet. We are not nearly as
rich with subsurface water as we used to be.

Three Influential Women: Nauta, Lane, and Woertendyke

Swent : Were you paid for this?

Maslach: Oh, yes. It s one of the things I wanted to point out and that
was that I remember getting my first paycheck. It was given to
me at the mechanical engineering office, which was then on the
first floor of the engineering building. I walked into the
building, walked into the office, and there were three women
there, maybe not standing by themselves at the time, but the
three women I met played major roles within the college.

The first one was Mrs. Nauta. I think that she was the
senior. And then there were two other women. The next one was
Violetta Lane, who later became the head of our undergraduate
office and is the person that most undergraduate students of the
thirties, forties, fifties, sixties remember because she was
 119

truly the spiritual guiding person in engineering. She was the

mother figure. She reallj was. I remember when she retired, and
I gave a speech at her retirement. I just said that she was the
spirit of engineering. All these old students came. One person
I remember in the Alumni Association: Miss Lane still there?"
"Is

She s still living out at Rossmoor. Wonderful, wonderful person.

And the third one was Frances Woertendyke, who later became
assistant to Dean Mike O Brien and stayed on and was one of the
major persons in the dean s office for many, many years. She
died--

Swent : She died just before our first interview.

Maslach: That s right, just a couple of months ago--

Swent : You mentioned it back then.

Maslach: --she died. Very sad to hear, You know, a person calling up and
telling all this--

She later became Frances Eberhart. She married Harold

Eberhart of civil engineering, and they moved upon retirement
down in the Santa Barbara area. But I remember receiving that
first paycheck. It was kind of nice. I had started summer work

during this period, working for Barrett and Hilp, as I said, and
when you re pouring concrete, you re making a dollar an hour. As
research assistant, I was making seventy-five cents an hour
[chuckles) the next year. But, of course, it was a different
kind of work. It was academic and there was much more to it.

Swent : Were these federal, government grants?

Maslach: This was a government grant or a contract, really. This was rare
at that time and was new. But you have to remember that the
Radiation Laboratory was already in full swing, and the Radiation
Laboratory was located right here on the campus, where the
chemical engineering building, the new one, is located today [Tan
Hall]. So there were grants of a certain nature. There was
research work in metallurgy and materials, I know, and there was
this one.

Swent : I think one of the things we might want to talk about is how the
whole business of grants, research grants, changed.

Maslach: Oh, yes. That s a big part of my life [laughs].

Swent : There were probably a lot fewer then.

 120

Maslach: Oh, very few. The fundamental agency was not set up at that
time. It was set up maybe a year later, 41. That was the
National Defense Research Council.

Swent : I wonder where the initiative came from.

Maslach: The National Defense Research Council?

Swent: I mean, would they come to the university and offer a grant, for
example? Or were professors chasing grants?

Maslach: It worked both ways in the early days. The war days and this
was the beginning, you know. The war had not been started as far
as we were concerned, so people in the industries and/or the
government would make monies available. In those days, they were
grants in aid, and they had a very, very low overhead; in fact,
probably zero. It was to support the students and the professor
and so on. Overhead was unheard of in those days.

Swent: You didn t think about that.

ft

Maslach: Well, it was quite a period of my life where things were kind of
jumping. I was dating Doris here on the campus and meeting with
her family. My brother was drafted early on and went in, became
a paratrooper. So my sister married that was some time earlier.
I told you I was in the wedding party, complete with tuxedo
[chuckles] and so on.

Swent: You hadn t mentioned that. I think we looked at a picture.

Maslach: The reason I mention it--I have a picture at home, I know, of the
whole wedding partybut the reason I mention it is that, as I
said earlier, I was thrust intowe all were thrust into an adult
relationship. We became older faster because of the Depression
and then the war. I constantly repeat myself on this. I might
have already said it, but think through in big terms. You re
born in 1920. And nine years old, you had a big Depression. You
know, every once in a while you re hungry. There s no food. I
mean, there were real problems. You walked down the street, and
people the men selling the apples. That was right; that was
true; that was happening all over.

And so to see this Depression, when you re nine, ten years

old and then downtown San Francisco the major labor movement and
so on. And then in 39 there s a war in Europe, ten years later.
This is your whole period of nine to nineteen. And guess what?
 121

It s dominated by poverty, frugality and war. And then all of a

sudden you re drafted.

Professors Larry Marshall and L. M. K. Boelter

Maslach: In my case, it didn t turn out quite that way because one day a
professor, here in Berkeley, electrical engineering, by the name
of Larry Marshallhe was one of the new breed of professors,
younger and not so organized with power electrical engineering,
which was essentially what electrical engineering did.
Electronics had not really advanced that well. And he came to me
one day--in fact, we kind of bumped into each other. I had just
finished measuring impellers on pumps that I was testing over in
the lab, and I had a couple of these impellers, and he saw me.
You know, he knew me. I had taken a course from him.

He said, "You re graduating this year."

I said, I looked at him,

"Yes." [chuckles], wondering what
he was going to say and why he stopped me, this whole thing. And
he gave me a very brief accounting of this laboratory at MIT,
radiation laboratory. But we had a Radiation Laboratory right on
campus, so I thought immediately, you know, it s another atomic
radiation laboratory. I said, "Well, we ve got radiation here."

He said, "No, no. This is entirely different."

Then he said that they were recruiting people and so on, and
need people, mechanical engineers.
"they It s mostly electrical
and physics, but they need mechanical engineers. Would you be
interested?"

I said, "Well, let me think about it," you know. Here I am,
just this kid [chuckles], you know. I had been working as a
laborer during the summer or I m up in the mountains, working as
a packer, and, you know, I couldn t believe that these things
were happening to me. I didn t think of it in those bigger
terms. I was just not sophisticated enough to understand what
was happening to me.

My advisor was L.M.K. Boelter, Lewellyn K. Boelter, who

later became dean of UCLA [University of California at Los
Angeles] engineering when they started it. He was the first
dean. So he was my advisor. We had kind of developed a good
relationship because I had taken a couple of classes with him,
including heat transfer. He was one of the top authorities. He
 122

and a professor at MIT were the two heat transfer experts. They
each had a different approach to heat transfer. There s two
schools of thought, and he was the one on this coast. He
developed Martinelli, Morrin, Seban, Johnson, and Drake and all
those people, the big names in the field of heat transfer.

Now, of course, we have added Chang-Lin Tien, but we

imported him, our former chancellor. He was a student of Robert
Drake at Princeton, and Robert Drake came from Berkeley.

Swent :
Going around.

Maslach: All in the mold. Yes, what goes around, comes around, for sure.
So anyway, I was thinking, "Gee, I ve got an offer for a job." I
was thinking, "Well, I haven t thought about a job" because I
felt that I would be drafted, just like anybody else. You have
to remember we went through some horrendous periods here because
following Pearl Harbor, the Japanese were sent to internment
camps, remember?

Swent: Yes.

Maslach: I remember going down there, oh, about where the stadium is
located, the track stadium is located, down below the Harmon Gym.
That s where the buses took the Japanese from Berkeley. There
were student friends of mine there, and there were families that
I knew that were taken there. I went down purposely and I looked
at it. So my internationalism had grown by leaps and bounds
during this period, and the war was getting closer and closer to
me .

As 1 said, I had this job offer, and then there was another
vague job offer I got through ray research work with O Brien and
Folsom. It never really developed very concretely, but Larry
Marshall was pushing me. So I would ask Boelter, "What should I
do? What do you think?" And Boelter told me--Boelter was
considered a great philosopher--Boelter told me that I should go
to MIT. This would be a wartime experience that I would never
see again. In fact, it would be an experience, engineering
experience, because they were well funded; it was a major
program. He knew basically what it was, but he didn t tell me.
And he said, "This is a wonderful next step."

What he talked about, which always stayed with me, was sort
of a lecture. When you take your first job out of college, what
is important is not what you do or the company you work for, how
much money you make and so on. What is important is who are you
going to be working for? Who will be supervising you? That
first job is an extension of your college work, and so the person
 123

you re going to be working for and the kind of work you re going
to be doing is all-important. Forget the money aspect of it.

He kind of wrapped me up with this philosophic cloak of

going to MIT and doing this work, which I didn t know what it
was. I didn t know until I got there. So I went to see Larry
Marshall again. He said, "Have you made up your mind?"

And so I said, "Okay, yes, I ll take it. Tell me what I

should do."

He said, ll get a form" and so on.

"I I had agreed to do
that job. I told Doris the next time I saw her, because we by
that time had already indicated our intention to get married. So
things were moving pretty fast [chuckles].

They were moving pretty fast for everybody. You know, the
people you see and hear today and then next week, you know,
they re gone. Not internment camps but usually in terms of being
drafted, taking jobs somewhere or getting married quickly and so
on. It was sort of a really hectic time. I was working as a
research assistant, putting in a lot of hours. I told you that
one of that landing craft job, why, we were working nights until
midnight, day after day after day.

Swent : What were you doing, designing?

Maslach: Well, no, the tow testing was to--we were using the tow tank to
see what the resistance, water resistance, and also the
efficiency of various kinds of impellers to be used to drive that
device. Of course, the great, great impeller for a water wheel
is the Pelton water wheel. It came out during the Gold Rush
days. So we had a lot of knowledge of that type of impeller, and
that s essentially what we ended up using. It s one of the most
efficient sources for that kind of a job.

We were doing all kinds of things of that nature. We had

gone past Christmas and, of course, we were now in the war. I
filled out the form for Larry Marshall and then I was given some
material, if I received a draft notice. I was to give that
material to my draft board. It always was sealed, incidentally
[chuckles], the envelope from MIT.

Swent: What about ROTC? Had that ever been--

Maslach: ROTC was in high school and in the university, but I did not take
it in high school. It was optional. And I did not take it in
college because they did not have it in community college, and
 124

when I came here it s only the first two years. So therefore I

was--

Swent :
Really skipped that, yes.

Maslach: --never in the community college at all--I mean, in the ROTC at

all. So I was really kind of floating. I want to give you this
impression. Everything was moving. In late April I was told by
the university, by my advisor, Boelter, that I could go to MIT.

Swent: April of 42, right?

Maslach: Yes, April of 42. I could go to MIT and skip all my finals for
that last semester. They would just give me a grade. This was
one of the things that was going on that led to--as I said, all
of this movement. All of a sudden, people were gone.
Eventually--! was the first to go to MIT from Berkeley, but
eventually from Berkeley came Ernie Martinelli, Ray s brother,
and Bob Grenzbach and Hank (Henry) Brockschmidt--Grenzbach was
best man at my wedding. And there was Johnny Butler. Pete
Tilton--his father was city regional planner in San Francisco.

There were lots of them. Art Hughes was another one. So

Marshall did a good job of recruiting here, okay? Most of those
--or quite a few of those, I should say, are mechanical
engineers. Ernie went on to a Ph.D. in physics here at Berkeley
and Rand Corporation and big research in the cold war period.
But all of a sudden, I was told to report to MIT. I said goodbye
to Boelter [chuckles], Folsom, you know. I got a job; I got to

go. And I had this check, got the tickets on the train, and say
goodbye to Doris [chuckles). It was really pretty hectic.

I remember my mother, Doris s mother and father, and Doris--

the train- -in those days, you took the ferry and then you went
from the ferry over to Oakland and then you took the train in
Oakland. You went on this long ride. I must admit it was--

Swent : It must have been several days.

Maslach: Oh, it was about three or four days, and I was on my way. A
whole future in front of me. And I knew very little about what I
was going to do or where I was going to go, and I was headed for
Boston. That was it. It s hard to describe now, but--

Swent: Blackouts?

Maslach: Oh, yes, blackouts in San Francisco, Boston, everywhere. But the
whole thing was, everything was moving. You didn t think twice
about a lot of these things. You just did things, almost like
 125

instinct told you this was the proper thing to do. I made that
decision on my first job, and that was one of the greatest
decisions I have ever made.
 126

III MIT RADIATION LABORATORY, 1942-1945

Getting Oriented as Number 504

Maslach: Arrived in Boston with another recruit, Al[len] Hoffmann. We

roomed for a while in Boston. We got there, and the Rad Lab was
open five and a half days a week. It was actually open twenty-
four hours a day, every day, seven days a week. But we got there
on Friday, and Saturday morning we presented ourselves at the
lab. Everything was high security. The entire MIT area where
this lab was, two or three buildings, including part of the main
building, was patrolled by armed troops.

And so the first thing you did was you walked and--oops!
And then you said where you were going and you identified
yourself, etc., etc., and then you went to another stop point,
and then they had your name or didn t have your name. And that s
as far as you got. If they had your name, why, you were in. You
were then taken into a personnel department meeting and
representatives, one by one.

Everybody was called college graduateswere called staff.

There was no hierarchy of full professor and so on. You were all
staff members. 1 was 504. They eventually went up to five
thousand. So I was sort of in at the end of the first floor.
The thing was wide open. Offices were nonexistent for most of
us. Had tables out in the hallways and desks were pieces of junk
[chuckles]. File cabinets--you didn t see them, you know.

Everything was under strict security measures. Of course,

the first thing they did was take your picture and issue you a
badge and a card, an identification card. You had to have one or
the other. If you came without a badge, why, you were stopped
and you had to show your card and then they would check you.
They would describe you and everything over the phone. And then
they gave you a temporary badge, you know, for the day.
 127

It was a very heavily security-oriented, regimented

operation. It had started about a year and a half earlier, about
19AO. It was basically the lab that was the major development
for radar. I gave you that book.

Swent: Yes, I enjoyed it.

1

Maslach: It s amazing what we saw. Kind of jumping ahead, at the end of

the war, why, we learned that we had the highest funding of all
the NDRC programs. The three big programs of NDRC were the radar
program of the Radiation Lab at MIT; the Manhattan Project, which
was the atomic bomb; and then the third one was the proximity
fuse, which was attached to anti-aircraftwhat do you call them?
[chuckles) --shells that were shot up, and then they used
proximity-type things for determining when to explode the anti
aircraft shell.

Swent: Where was that research?

Maslach: That was down in the Washington, D.C., area.

Swent: It wasn t here.

Maslach: No, it wasn t here. So those are threebut they had many, many
other projects, including the next one being underwater sounds.
That was at Harvard. This was sonar, submarine detection. But
they had a whole bunch of smaller ones as well.

Swent: What was the distinction between the Rad Lab there and the Rad
Lab here? Same name, but

Maslach: The distinction was that the radiation at Berkeley was atomic
radiation, whereas the radiation we were talking about there was
radiation that you have which is the extension of sound. With
f requency--there s a whole spectrum of frequency which visible

light, sound and so on are a part of. And then when you get way
out here to give you an idea, the wavelength is, like, one
millimeter, ten millimeters, three centimeters, one centimeter.

And the radar development that we started and MIT at the

beginning, when I first got there, it was ten-centimeter
wavelength. That s about four inches per complete wave cycle.
That s the energy going out in that cycle form. Then they went
to three-centimeter radar, which was the main radar that was
developed for the largest number. And then they went to one-

Five Years at the Radiation Laboratory. 1991 IEEE MTT-S International

Microwave Symposium.
 128

centimeter radar, and there was a lot of interest in that book

because that one-centimeter stuff after the war was much more
useful for detection devices for atomic physics.

So we were sending radiation out from a radar antenna, which

is a--there might be some right around this roof here you ve
seen the parabolic antennas. That s the radiation; it s being
transmitted from that today, they transmit with dishes, three
feet or so in diameter and sometimes larger, to satellites which
are synchronously rotating with the aarth. In other words, there
are satellites right above us up here, a whole bunch of them.
That frequency is then retransmitted back to us. This is dish
satellite technology for television.

Swent: Which all started at MIT.

Maslach: Everything started at MIT. The major part of the electronic

revolution came out of MIT, with the twenty-seven volumes that
they published at the end of the laboratory under the editorship
of George Valley, a man mentioned in that book that I gave you.
And all the electronic devices that were developed had immediate
value in television and all kinds of transmission. Radar
transmission--! should say microwave transmissiontoday is the
way that telephone calls come to you. And so there s just an
enormous revolution that occurred. I don t want to neglect the
revolution that occurred from the atomic bomb development
project, but in terms of direct public-private use of the
individual, the work there, at the Rad Lab, was far more useful.

And we had adjunct laboratories. For example, Charlie

Townes was down there at Columbia, and he got the Nobel Prize in
physics. What did he get it for? Well, everybody remembers he
got it for the laser development because lasers are common to us
today. The first thing he developed was the maser, which was
microwave amplification, okay?

Swent: Yes.

Maslach: Whereas laser is light amplification. So you re in a different

part of the spectrum. Microwave was essentially a radar-type
application. Getting the most energy out and receiving a very
small amount back. An enormous difference. You re talking ten
to the fifteenth, sixteenth (10 lb , 10 16
) difference between the
energy level here and what you get back. That s ten multiplied
fifteen times. I don t know what that is. A nano is probably up
around twelve or so, and I ve forgotten the name of the next one.
 129

But it was just an enormous time of my life. Here s this

raw kid, you know, working in a laboratory with some pumps and
something. Doesn t even finish college formally, with a
ceremony, and there he is, in the big city of Boston. It s all
new. It s all just exciting. You re on your own. I always
remember this because I think in terms of my children going to
college, which was sort of the same thing. Christina went to
Radcliffe, and Jamie went to Harvard. At a younger age, they had
much the same experience, acclimating, developing your life,
finding a place to live, starting a bank account, learning how to
do your laundry [chuckles], cooking, eating food or other people
are preparing food, and so on. All these things changed and
changed so fast in this whole regard.

just couldn t believe what was happening to me.

I I guess
everything I had learned to that point stood me in good stead
because I was never, never intimidated, by any of this. I never
was overwhelmed by anything. I just got into it. I just did it
naturally, just normally. This was my life.

"The Biggest Block Party You Ever Saw" in Hamtramck

Maslach: A couple of things happened, one of them rather humorous, on the

way. For example, I have family--my father s family
predominantly in the Chicago area. So my family told people
there that I was going to come on the train and be in Chicago.

Swent : You had to change trains.

Maslach: Yes. arrived in the morning, and I took a train out in the
I

evening. Al Hoffmann was with me. So we got in there. I was

met by a man who was related to me in a distant way, who worked
for a steel company. He was a machinist, operating a big milling
machine, trimming various large I-beams and so on. He rode on
this machine sixty feet long. He rode with the tool back and
forth [chuckles]. He later became vice president of that steel
company. He was a very, very sophisticated, modern man. And his
wife was just the same. Very Polish.

was taken in a car from downtown Chicago train station to

I
Hamtramck, which is the Polish community on the border of
Chicago. It s right next to Cicero. So you re right in a Mafia-
dominated type of downtown, of a small town. So Johnny drove me
up to the house. The aunt. I m trying to remember it to
describe the house to you perfectly. All the houses were brick.
This house that they owned was, oh, five or six houses removed
 130

from the cathedral. And it was the biggest brick cathedral ycu
ever saw. Poles, 99.9 percent Catholic. And this was a Catholic
community. When you got out of that car, all you heard was
Polish. Little kids, the big kids, everybody. It was Polish.

I was pushed back from going to work on radar to a Polish

community which was really back in the twenties, thirties. I
came into the house with Johnny and his wife, and all of a
sudden, his wife disappeared. Johnny and I were there, and I am
meeting all the men. All the men were there. And only men. I
remember hearing about my aunt [chuckles]. Here I am, in this
front room of this house. Very nice, very old fashioned.
Fireplace, mantelpiece. And over at the side a table just filled
with bottles of liquor. Immediately pouring straight shots,
straight shots of bourbon, good bourbon. But they toasted your
father, toasted your mother, toasted this--

I swear, in ten minutes I--I was just sipping a little, but,

I mean, I was drinking--you couldn t believe how much we drank.
They drank, especially. WHSSHT! Bottoms up. This was all my
relatives and their friends, male. And all of a sudden,
something was said, and guess what. In come the women, who were
all back in the kitchen. The dining room had been screened off
with draw curtains. There was a living room and a dining room
and back there was this kitchen.

So I met my aunt the first time, and I met somebody else,

cousins and what have you. It was just real old family, you
know?

Swent :
They were all so thrilled to see you?

Maslach: Oh, I was the first person in the family who had graduated from a

university. My brother did not graduate and didn t get his law
degree until later, and my sister didn t graduate. She got
married before she graduated. I was the graduate of the
university. And this, you know--we had this fantastic meal. The
food! The neighbors came in! The bishop came in! Everybody!
It was the biggest block party [chuckles] you ever saw.

Swent: How exciting!

Maslach: Anyway, I was driven back to the other station, where I took
another train.

Swent: So after this incredible day in Chicago, you had to get on the
train again, back to the real world.
 131

Maslach: I got on the train again, and I must say that I--all I can
remember was food, hard liquor, and wine. It was just a drinking
party in many respects, of a type that I had never seen before in
my life. I had seen people up in North Beach and the opening of
the Fair in 1939, which I thought was a pretty good binge, and I
have had relations with people who were alcoholics and so on, but
never, never had I had that kind of a party, with just dozens of
people coming in and out and so on. So it was a great, great
party.

I went on, and the train had a wonderful itinerary. I don t

know who set it up. We got the tickets, and we got to Troy, New
York, and we changed trains again to a smaller train company that
went through the beautiful Berkshire countryside, because our
ticket read not Boston but Cambridge, so we ended up eventually
at Porterhouse Square station, famous for the Porterhouse steak
restaurant there [chuckles], and we were in Cambridge, not in
Boston, which was a strange way in many respects. Obviously, a
ticket was made up by somebody on the Pacific Coast who did not
know that MIT was actually closer to North Station or South
Station in Boston than it was to Porterhouse Square station
[chuckles], even though Porterhouse Square was in Cambridge.

On the way, we had a most interesting time. I saw New

England; I saw essentially the East Coast for the first time in
my life, of course. The first reactions this is Maywas my
God, how green everything is! The green was overwhelming. You
know, you come from Chicago. You go through the historic Erie
Canal area all the way over to Troy and that area, upper New
York. And there is a lot of greenery there. And then here you
are, in this absolutely fabulous Berkshire territory. You re
coming down these old Indian trails basically, you know. It s
just the Mohawk Trail line coming into Cambridge. And it moved
quite slowly. And it had only about three or four cars, and it
had sort of a semi-club car, where we had breakfast and so on.

There was a man there, an older man. I m talking fifties,

maybe early sixties even. He was obviously a well-to-do person.
It turned out he was a banker. So I sat down with him for some
time, he and Al and I. Al wasn t as interested in other people
as I was. I remember just talking with this man. He said that
this migration from the West Coast to the East Coast doesn t
work, that the people that come from California in his business,
they never stayed in the East Coast. They always want to get
back to California.

And so he said, "What you should do is make the most of

You know, learn and move up in your profession.
this." I
couldn t tell him anything, of course, because we were sworn to
 132

secrecy. He just kind of gave me a cultural lesson on what was

happening to me and where I was going. Boston. He talked a lot
about Boston, Boston society and this and that, and the culture,
you know, New England. He got into quite a few things, including
the Irish, which was the dominant population in Boston, and the
Italian a bit, but mostly the Irish he talked about because the
Irish politicians were best known at that time.

I always remember this man with a great feeling of--he

introduced me in a kind of a strange way. You know, he was one
more person in the line who gave me hints and directions and so
on and pointed out that I would return to California. "Everybody
does. We can t keep them."

So we arrived at Porterhouse station at night. Took a cab

down to MIT. Got off at the graduate house, which was for
graduate students but had been pre-empted by everybody and
anybody so that you could get lodging there on short notice,
especially for projects like the Rad Lab. So I went in and
showed him my letter and "Oh, yes, we have room." So Al and I
had a room [chuckles]. Midnight. And next day, of course, we
got sworn into the MIT Rad Lab.

But the touching note that I wanted to put here is that,

yes, I was the first kid, you know, to graduate in the family,
but I hadn t graduated. I remember being in Chicago and they
said the first person who graduated. I said, "Graduation is next
month. I haven t graduated."

Swent : But you knew you would .

Maslach: But I was told that I would and so on, but I didn t know it was

going to happen. There s another big unknown in this thing.

Well, for about, oh, two or three months later, my mother mailed
to me my diploma, which had been mailed to her. Years later, I
found out this was one of the greatest disappointments my mother
ever had. Of all the people, here I was, I graduated. She never
went to the commencement.

Swent: Couldn t go to see you.

Maslach: I was the only chance, and she didn t--until the day she died, I
1

think that was--she said it often, not just once or twice, maybe
half a dozen times. That was a big disappointment. I never
graduated in a sense. I never got a diploma handed to me. And
years later, as dean, I was handing out diplomas [chuckles], so
it was kind of a strange circle, you know, the events in this
whole thing. But I always remembered being told that I was a
big, big disappointment.
 133

Sailing the Transpac Race, 1939

Maslach: The other thing that I neglected to talk about was an event that
occurred in 1939. I had been doing a lot of sailing and racing,
as I told you earlier, in the Bay Area, and 1 had an opportunity
to sail on the Transpac Race, which started at the San Francisco
World s Fair, Treasure Island, and ended up in Honolulu.
Actually, the finish line was at Koko Head, which is further out
than Diamond Head.

We finished up in the middle of the night. This wonderful

yachtsmen in San Francisco heard of me and liked me, and he knew
me and he saw me racing and sailing, and so he offered this deal,
and I essentially sailed fourteen days, day and night, sailing
from San Francisco down to Oahu.

Swent : You were part of the crew?

Maslach: Yes, part of the crew. A 50-foot boat, 55-foot to be precise.

Not very big. Today they have single-handed racers going around
the world, you know, with 60-foot boats. But we had a regular
crew, and we had a bunch of younger Boy Scouts in the crew,
incidentally. He was big on Boy Scouting. Not Boy Scouts. Sea
Scouts. And anyway, coming back took about a month. Then I saw
Honolulu. I saw it in 1939. Waikiki, the beach, the Royal
Hawaiian, a couple of other hotels there. At the end of a
trolley line, way the hell out. And between that and Honolulu
was nothing but pineapple fields. And the Alawai Canal. And you
had the yacht harbor there on the Alawai Canal. They still use
it for the end of the race. The boats put in there. But it was
farm country. Don t kid yourself. There was a military base;
there was an R&R [Rest and Recreation] place right there, Fort de
Russy. But it was really something, 39.

So I had a wonderful experience there. The reason 1 was

able to do it, because it took time away from working, was that I
had had such good jobs, making such good pay up there in Yosemite
and also Barrett and Hilp. I worked even one of those years,

40, I worked even in my Christmas vacation as a laborer.

Earlier Work as a Laborer for Barrett and Hilp in San Francisco

Swent: You said you belonged to a union.

Maslach: That s a very humorous story.

 134

Swent : Which union was it?

Maslach: My roommate in college, a man by the name of Duane Gordon, later

went into the navy. He was drafted, and he went through
officers training school, and he was with the flying boat
business. You know, these big boats that planes could land on on
sea and so on. Submarine patrol, what have you. He never made
the navy his career, but Duane and I--in fact, he s the one that
made the contact with Barrett and lilp. He knew about the job.

The humorous part was that Barrett was a St. Mary s graduate
and a big alumni sponsor of St. Mary s College. St. Mary s was a
football power; Santa Clara- [vs .] -St. Mary s was the "little big
game" in the Bay Area. That was a major sporting event. You
realize, immediately that St. Mary s and Santa Clara are both
Catholic universities, private universities, and in many respects
this was sort of a Catholic community of the Bay Area, having
their game, because a lot of the hierarchy of San Francisco
especially went either to Santa Clara, St. Mary s, or the
University of San Francisco, which is a Jesuit school, as you
well know. In fact, most of the politicians came out of USF.
That was the mother school, you know, for the Irish and the
Italian population in San Francisco. We did have our ethnic
differences, but it wasn t a racial war. Everybody recognized
this difference.

But anyway, getting back to getting into the union, Duane

one day comes in. We shared an apartment up on the hill, up on
La Vereda.

Swent : I had assumed you were living at home and commuting all this
time.

Maslach: No, no, I only commuted for six months.

Swent : I see .

Maslach: And then the next two years, a little less than two years, a year
and a half, I lived over here. And so I was in the Berkeley
community during that entire time. But Duane came in one day.
He says, "Hey! We can get in the union."

I said, "What are you talking about?" He told me about the

jobs that we had been talking about because he had mentioned it
earlier, getting a job as a laborer, working for Barrett and
Hilp.

He had some contact that I didn t know about. Anyway, what

we did is we went down to the labor temple (which it was called)
 135

on Valencia Street, and about, oh, 14th. Right near the armory.
It s this large, green, wooden building. It was the headquarters
for the building trades unions in San Francisco: the carpenters,
the plumbers, the electricians, and everything else. The union
that we got into was the Labor and Hod Carriers Union. Okay?
That shows you the days. Hod carriers were still big.

Swent : Still hod carriers.

Maslach: Plaster and concrete and grouting and so on for bricks. That was
all there. So we went in and we just kind of, you know, made
ourselves invisible [chuckles]. And all of a sudden, a bus comes
up. Out of the bus walk about twenty guys, roughly twenty, all
big. Obviously football players [chuckles]. And this was St.
Mary s, you know. So they came in, and there was some special
arrangement, and there s a window open, and these guys all in a
line. So we got in line. I was about, six foot four, so--Duane
was a husky guy, around six foot one, two. And so we just stood
in the line.

We had to pay a very small amount of money to get into the

union, initiation fee or whatever they called it. And then they
tookyou got the money deducted from your check; it went to the
union. Okay? Those were your dues. So we got our union card,
and it was a temporary union card. A real card, but it was
stamped. And so we got our badge, and the first thing we did was
buy the cap, which was white- -white fabric. You know,
longshoreman, you see they all wore the same kind of a cap. And
so you had that cap on. There was longshoremen, laborers, hod
carriers all wore thatblack jeans. Black jeans, not blue
jeans. Black jeans.

And, of course, the standard work shirt, which was, you

know, a stripe, heavy. Three Brothers or one of the other you
still can buy them. Workshirts, very heavy cloths. And you had
to have a hammer. All these things you were told. Okay.

Swent: You provided your own hammer?

Maslach: You had your own hammer. We all had hammers. That was no
problem. We were told to report to this building which was being
built by Barrett and Hilp. The building is still standing, of
course, on O Farrell and Mason. It s the building that housed
the radio stations. I think it was the NBC building or the CBS

building. We constructed that during the first summer. Finished

it up in the wintertime, and then the next year we were working
on well, you know the big garage in Union Square? We worked
part-time there. We worked on the airport, San Francisco
 136

airport, on the United [Airlines] buildings for maintenance, the

maintenance buildings, the hangar and so on.

Swent : You were just doing this during vacations?

Maslach: Yes, vacation times only.

Swent: Weekends?

Maslach: Not weekends, just vacation times. So it was interesting. As I

said, 83.5 cents an hour was your base wage, and then a dollar an
hour if you re pouring concrete, a dollar and a quarter an hour
if you were handling a vibrator. You had to know something about
that. Every once in a while, I learned to handle vibrators. And
also they had another category, which was carpenter s apprentice.
That might not have been the right word, but basically it was a
carpenter s helper. You got to learn, so I was helping a
carpenter. Basically, you were a go-fer, and you were bringing
up lumber pieces, you were doing nailing, rough stuff. You never
touched any finished work, but you just were useful in a variety
of ways.

Swent: You were capable of a lot more than this.

Maslach: I was. I could do more than that because of the work I had done
with the Scouts up at Camp Roy-A-Neh, building those cabins and
laying roofing and so on. But I was learning. It was the first
time I could see the people that put in the reinforcing steel for
the concrete work, and see it all wired together. Watched these
guys. These were the higher-paid people, you know. Then, of
course, you had all the plumbers and electricians coming behind
you as you were going along.

So could see construction in every phase of it as I was

I

working. Some of the things that we did, you know, were just
plain hard, hard, menial work. For example, the pit that was dug
on O Farrell Street for that building needed to have a retaining
wall, which was on the order of fifteen, eighteen feet in height.
You had to dig fifteen, eighteen foot through this sandy soil
until you got down to bedrock, and you had to make a good depth
incursion into that, and then they would put these enormous beams
in.

It s right next to the Clift Hotel,

and when they got down
low, why, we found out that the Clift Hotel foundations weren t
very good down there.

Swent : Ooh.
 137

Maslach: And so the Clift Hotel people came, and they had their people in
there, and then they had a program of putting in foundations
under the building there. So I always remember going into the
Clift Hotel in my work clothes because I had to go in there in
order to do something. I forget what I had to do. Oh, 1 had to
get some- -some skilled worker that was down there; there was a
telephone call for him. I went and got him. I remember going
through those elegant rooms. The first time in my life that I
went through the Redwood Room. You know that bar?

Swent : Yes.

Maslach: I think it s one of the most beautiful rooms in all the world.
Bar or restaurant. But that s how we got into the union.
Actually, we were supposed to renew our union every year, but all
we did was just keep sending our money in. And so we were quasi-
permanent in Barrett and Hilp. We just telephoned Barrett and
Hilp s office and identified ourselves and "where do you want us
to go?" And we had jobs whenever we wanted them.

That picture that I showed you was taken by a photographer

who was doing an article a writerwho was doing an article on
that building. It was a rather unique building. It had a big
facade eventually with a tile--very, very wonderful mosaic.
Three-and-a-half- by three-and-a-half -inch tiles. It was done by
an artist from either Mexico or South America, probably Mexico
because that was the days of Diego Rivera and so on. We have a
mosaic right up here. Not a mosaic. We have a Diego Rivera--

Swent: Mural?

Maslach: Mural in Stern Hall.

Swent: Oh, really?

Maslach: Yes. It s beautiful. Right in Stern Hall. You ought to go see

it sometime. Very nice. He did several murals. He did one for
the Haas family, showing a lot of the kids and so on. And Stern.
That s part of the whole Haas network, family. Stern Grove and
all that.

And so anyway, I got to see San Francisco again in a

sophisticated light because by this time I was nineteen, twenty,
twenty-one, you know. Of course, Prohibition had been repealed,
and it was the night life, not just the Blackhawk. I could now
walk into the Blackhawk and sit down on the other side, you know
[chuckles ) .

Swent: No more chicken coop.

 138

Maslach: No more chicken coop. And I remember walking down through the
parts of San Francisco. It was just a big time in those days. I
always remember, you know, and I think I might have told you
this, but to repeat, Doris and I used to go on dates coming over
to San Francisco, and we would eat out and stuff like that. But
we would also go to places like Top of the Mark. Well, the Top
of the Mark, before the World War influx of military, was just
empty. Literally, you could walk in there, and we did this time
and again. We were both under-age. The bar was in the center,
and you would go on the edges, where all these tables were, and
you would choose the one you wanted. There was one around kind
of a corner that looked out at the Gate, and if the fog was not
in and you could look out and see the bridge towers and stuff
like that. That was kind of a nice view out. that way. Sort of
Cathedral Hill and that area.

And the other way around, why, you had Nob Hill underneath
you, but you had Telegraph Hill over there. Now partially
blocked out by the Fairmont tower that was put up. But we would
sit there. One drink. About an hour and a half. They knew we
were under-age. We just had a drink, and you would leave a good
tip, and that was it [chuckles]. But we did these kinds of
things .

I I told you Doris on her thirtieth birthday, we went

think
there. She was asked for her ID [laughs]. She thought someone
put him up to it. Maybe somebody did. I didn t. It was fun.

Swent : You must have been homesick when you were in Boston?

Maslach: Oh, yes. We had made up our mind to get married, you know, and
we did a lot of writing. But I think we should leave this to
maybe a later time.

Swent :
Okay .

Maslach: Because I developed essentially a kind of a new life in Boston,

and then we developed another new life. Everything keeps going
by these pieces. They are ten-year pieces, if you start plotting
them in time. Here was my first big move, you know, to the big
city.

Swent: That s a big one.

Maslach: Man, it was different. I ll tell you that [chuckles].

Swent: Well, this may be a good place to stop then. We ve got you to
Cambridge .
 139

The Excitement of the Rad Lab

[Interview 4: October 6, 1998]

Swent : This is October 6th, 1998, and we re at 536 Cory Hall, on a

beautiful October morning. We have gotten you to MIT in 1942,
wasn t it?

Maslach: Yes. For some reason, this morning I feel like I m giving you
another chapter in the Hardy Boys mystery or the adventures of
Tom Sawyer and his electric automobile or something like that.
But it s going to be very difficult for me to convey the
excitement of being at MIT at the Radiation Laboratory during
World War II.

Swent: We ve got these wonderful documents here that try to convey that
excitement also.

Maslach: The important book is the burgundy-colored one, which is entitled

Five Years. 1

It gives the official five-year history of the

Radiation Laboratory, with lots of pictures. You can trace my
picture in several of the departments that I worked with. This
was a memento that was given away to any person that was at the
Rad Lab.

Now, first, to give you some idea of scale, at its peak

there were over five thousand staff members. These are people
with advanced degrees or degrees, at least, primarily in physics
and electrical engineering but then many in chemistry and
mechanical engineering and so on. When I came in 1942, my number
was 504, so I was in the first ten percent of the people that
they hired. But I wasn t in that grand core of about a hundred
that really started the laboratory about a year before I got
there. They were the real pioneers.

The history of the laboratory in popular texts is given by

this book, The Invention That Changed the World, a subtitle being
How a Small Group of Radar Pioneers Won the Second World War and
Launched a Technical Revolution. [Robert Buderi, Simon &
Schuster, Touchstone Press, 1996] It is very well done, very
precise, very accurate. It, however, focuses on the leaders and
the people who eventually got Nobel Prizes, for example, for work
that they did after the Radiation Laboratory, so it is not as
much a scientific text or a historical text as a text that talks

Five Years at the Radiation Laboratory. 1991, IEEE MTT-S, International

Microwave Symposium.
 140

about individuals and what they did within the framework of this
great laboratory.

Swent : I notice that you were in Division Six. Did this mean that you
were in the sixthwas this a chronological division?

Maslach: No. Divisions are not chronological. Division 1 was

administration and so on. Three was theory; Four was power in
other words, getting the pulse of energy out; and then Five was
receivers, which received the pulse back, a very minute fraction
of the pulse; Seven, Eight, and Nine were land systems, naval
systems, air systems. And we came along with Division Ten, and
we had a whole potpourri of jobs. We were not specifically land-
or naval-based; we worked across the board. And then Division
Eleven was LORAN, or long-range navigation. There was another
division after that, which was organized quite late.

But here
I am, at the train station. Got down to the
graduate house and to MIT on Mass [achusetts] Avenue, by cab. And
Al and I got a room in the graduate house, which is similar to
the I House [International House] here at Berkeley but larger and
much more of a dormitory arrangement, rather than a social
arrangement. Saturday morning, woke up, went down and had
breakfast in a very busy cafeteria, and went over to the entrance
office to register at the Radiation Laboratory.

They worked five and a half days a week, so Saturday morning

was work day. Now, the thing you have to remember [chuckles]
a
is this was wartime, and you had to go past at least two lines
of--patrol lines, with soldiers with rifles. And you finally
were able to get to the laboratory entrance. The laboratory was
distributed throughout the entire MIT complex. The main
building, which of course you see in pictures all the time, they
had a small wing, but they had offices or desks, that is, out in
the main hallway. You had all kinds of activities going on,
almost in public. Actually, they were not in public, but they
were not heavily guarded, either. Everything was quite visible.

There were a number of temporary buildings and one large

permanent building, Building 24. Building 24 was about ten
stories high, and the main offices for the director and so on
were on the second floor. Well, we got into the first floor, and
then we had to sit and wait for a long time and eventually we
were given our credentials, which included a pass, wallet-size
pass, and then a big badge. I still have these things
[chuckles] .

Swent: Of course.
 141

Maslach: They had your picture on the badge and your number. We were now
enrolled, and we were taken over to Division Ten, which was the
division was located over near the armory on the edge of the
campus. It was an old building that was used for manufacturing
shoe polish, but it was now taken over. MIT just rented all
kinds of space for this enormous organization that started with a
hundred people and was to build to over five thousand staff. And
that doesn t count support staff because we had, besides, big
machine shops, drafting rooms, and all kinds of activities,
including personnel offices, publications offices, and all that.
It was the size of a campus, only we had a faculty of five
thousand people [chuckles] with no students.

So I got a desk and probably as important, a drafting board,

drafting machine and so on. By this time, it was about lunch
time so we quit for the day and the weekend. Got back to the
graduate house and was told that we would have to leave the
graduate house in a week or two because the building was going to
be taken over for a school of meteorologists, for the military.

So that afternoon I of course started looking for a place to

live [chuckles]. If you walk one way from MIT, going to
Cambridge, you go through one industrial section and a commercial
section and then you get into Harvard Square. Most of the senior
people in the lab lived up there in the Harvard Square area.
They had colleagues that they knew, and they rented houses and/or
apartments in the Harvard area.

If you turned and walked the other way from MIT, you went
across the Mass Avenue Bridge to Boston, and the first street,
cross street, was Beacon, Beacon Street, famous in literature,
history. I was able--Al and I, that is--we were able to find a
room, a beautiful room, onto a big patio.

Swent : It wasn t called a patio in Massachusetts [chuckles].

Maslach: No, it was just sort of a brick area with some nice planting and
so on. But during the wintertime it was pretty dull and dreary,
but in the spring and summer, why, it was quite different. I
remember that the next day--

Swent : How much did you pay for this apartment? Do you remember?

Maslach: Oh, it was so ridiculously small. You couldn t believe it. It

was a very large room, fireplace and desk area and so on, and
sort of twin beds off to the side, you know.

Swent: A kitchen?
 142

Maslach: It was rooming only. Nearby was a very good, low-cost breakfast,
lunch place. So we had all kinds of--

Swent: How much did you pay for it? Do you remember?

Maslach: I don t remember. I really don t remember. But I can tell you
what my salary was. It was three hundred dollars a month. That
was essentially a notch above graduate students salaries, which
were around two hundred and fifty a month.

Swent : That was quite a little then, wasn t it?

Maslach: At three hundred a month, you would be surprised at what I was

able to do, and later, next year, when Doris and I were married--
I had a raise in betweenthe things that we did for three
hundred dollars a month. Of course, taxes were low. This was
wartime, with controlled prices, and we did not have a car. You
could not get a car, really. And it was quite a different kind
of austere but adventuresome place to be.

Swent: You could travel anywhere on the subway for--it was only a
nickel, wasn t it?

Maslach: A nickel, yes. This was the famous MTA. Getting lost on the MTA
was a pretty simple thing to do [laughter].

Swent: There s a song about getting lost on the MTA. And you could buy
a pair of shoes for about fifteen dollars or something, wasn t
it?

Maslach: I ve forgotten what--

Swent: Everything was comparable.

Maslach: Talking about shoes, this was one of the first things I had to
buy because New England and its weather, which is atrocious. I
arrived there the first week of May, and there was lots of snow
on the ground, and we had snowstorms in May. You needed heavy
overcoats in May. I remember once going out and one of my
draftsmen stopped me and said, "Hey, this is pneumonia weather."
People do not go out without an overcoat, and a scarf around your
neck.

I think the first things that I really bought were galoshes.

You bought the big, four-buckle galoshes that went halfway up
your calf [chuckles] because Boston had the theory that God
brought the snow and God would take it away in time, and so they
would just pile it up and not they did not have snow plows and
snow removal equipment in Boston. I lived through a couple of
 143

major storms there and saw the havoc that that snow and ice would
mean.

Well, getting back to MIT, Al was off visiting a family that

he knew of, had a letter of introduction to. He finally married
the daughter in that family. I was best man at his wedding. I
went exploring because that s my wont. I was intrigued with the
maps and so on of Boston. Of course, the first thing, if you re
going to be living on Beacon Street, which I was going to be
doing, you had to go up to Beacon Hill, which meant that you
walked, oh, about half a mile towards the center of town and then
you went up this small incline, not much of a hill compared to
San Francisco hills. But the statehouse was up there, and Sunday
morning was bright and nice and you went to different places and
saw different things. You walked past the old burial grounds,
where a lot of famous people had been buried. And then down to
Kings Chapel to see a famous church and so on. So anyway, I kind
of wandered around all these historic places.

James Lawson and Jerrold Zacharias

Maslach: Monday morning, right at work at eight o clock in the morning. I

always remember being in the cafeteria at the graduate house just

before going over to my office. There was a man two steps ahead
of me, who had the most disheveled look, piercing eyes, tall,
gaunt, and hollow cheeks, major cheekbones and so on, and he was
just talking a blue streak and using words which I had been
informed, from the manual that I had been given, that should not
be used in public. These were classified words.

For example, "radar" was a classified word. He was talking

about the projects and ideas that he had and so on. I always
remember the look of the man. He was just totally inspired. He
looked like John Brown [chuckles] starting the Civil War.
Anyway, I later found out, when I attended a seminar that week,
that this was Jim Lawson. He is mentioned in this more popular
textbook--! mean, more popular description of the laboratory
bookas one of the great idea men of MIT s Rad Lab. In fact,
there s a comment in that book, saying that Lawson had enough
ideas to pay for the staff of the laboratory for the whole month.
And this was true. He was just one of these mercurial people.

And in the seminar on the other side, almost it was almost

an adversarial thing, the seminarwas Professor [Jerrold]
Zacharias. You ll have to get the spelling out of that book.
 144

Zacharias was just the antithesis of Lawson. He was a rounded

man.

Swent: Jim Lawson. Is that it?

Maslach: Lawson, yes. Jerrold Zacharias, I think it is. He s got a

strange first name. Anyway, Zacharias was slightly rounded, very
professorial type and slow-spoken and very logical in his
approach, almost ponderous, really, in how he would answer a
question. lawson, on the other hand, was a person who was
flinging his arms around and going up to the board and writing
equations like mad. Between the two of them, they had this
fantastic debate. All the rest of us would just sit there
[chuckles], looking like a tennis match from one to the other.

These seminars were outstanding. You could not believe the

excitement because people in the audience--not me, but the people
in the audience who knew exactly what was being discussed and
here they were listening to two super heroes in this discussion.
So that was kind of my introduction to the lab.

Luis Alvarez Requests an Antenna Design

Maslach: On the very first day, Luis Alvarez, who later became a Nobel
Prize winner from Berkeley, in physics, came and visited me. He
had noted in the register that I was mechanical engineer, and he
had some real problem in mechanical engineering and he wanted to
talk it over with me. So here I am, right fresh out of school-
in fact, I don t have my diploma [chuckles]; classes are still
going on in Berkeleyand a future Nobel Prize winner, one of the
great physicists of the time, was, you know, asking my opinion on
things .

One of the first things I remember we discussed were early

warning devices, which were being put up along the Pacific Coast.
Remember we had submarines lobbing shells into Santa Barbara oil
refineries. So he had his ideas of what the mechanics of the
antenna should look like, but he had no idea how to support it.
I was sketching different kinds of supports, and they all ended
up to be like pyramids or cones. Eventually, all the big
antennas used in the world for satellite tracking and everything
else are essentially that basic design. It s a logical design
for the antenna. So it was very exciting just--

Swent: This design that you drew.

 145

Maslach: Well, I actually sketched all of these designs, and I cannot

claim paternity for any of the future "designs because, as I said,
it was a logical thing for the very large antennas that are being
used today, fifty-foot diameter. Many years later, when I was
dean of engineering at Berkeley, I was asked to go to Hawaii and
repair one of the big antennas, and I did. It was sort of deja
vu because the man who designed that antenna was the best man at
my wedding [chuckles], Bob Grenzbach, and so I knew quite a bit
about that antenna. He had designed it after the war, when he
was working down in a firm down in Cohasset, Massachusetts, just
below Boston.

Anyway, I spent about a week doing all kinds of preliminary

designs, not only for Luis but I was learning something about
other programs that needed mechanical help in terms of structural
design and/or instrumentation design. To kind of clarify it,
basically everybody has seen radar antennas and transmission
devices. It s a parabolic dish that s mounted on a yoke which
can allow the dish to be tilted up, and the yoke rotates so you
get 360 degrees horizontal coverage, so you get to scan the sky
with this antenna. So that s a mechanical device, very simple.
But it had all kinds of instrumentation hanging out of it to tell
the radar equipment that it was pointed in a certain direction,
certain azimuths, certain altitude, and so on. So that was a
major part of mechanical engineering for me during part of the
MIT period.

The other end of the line was the receiver that received the
signal through the antenna, and that ended up as a dot, if there
was a target, on what was called a plan position indicator, PPI .

You re looking downward at a plan view, and the position is

showing in azimuths, and the distance out from the center would
be the range. That would be the device which had rotating parts
and all kinds of other instrumentation. So another mechanical
device, heavily mechanical device, is the display. The rest of
radar, very heavily, is electronics. And in many respects, the
only fault I could find with this book on the history of the
laboratory is that they never, in that book, emphasized the
enormous development of modern-day electronics, which was done
during that time.

These were done by people who were not necessarily

electrical engineers. For example, Britt Chance was a physical
chemist. He designed a gating circuit which could be used in so
many different ways. It became truly one of the breakthroughs
that made radar the precision instrument it is. He laterhe and
his wife, who were very active there at the laboratory, later had
a famous son. He is a naval architect. He has done design work
on all kinds of competitive yachts.
 146

Two Months of Crammed Education in Radar

Maslach: After about one week, I was told that the lab had not really been
organized to get so many people so fast, and so I was told that
I, along with lots of other recent hires, would be given a two-
month course in radar. We were to report to the Harbor Building,
which was close to the South Station in Boston, and we would
study, receive lectures, do laboratory work, and so on. Well,
this was the most horrendous learning experience I have ever gone
through. We had four hours of lecture in the morning, started
laboratories at one-thirty in the afternoon, and quite often we d
be there at midnight. And every Saturday there was a three-hour
test. That is really crammed education!

Swent : Who was teaching it?

Maslach: Well, the various people who were teaching were experts in the
particular areas that were being covered. In fact, we started
off with the theory of radar and what actually happens, the
propagation of energy and the return of energy and so on.

Swent: Had it been developed to that point by then?

Maslach: Oh, yes.In fact, if you go back in the history of the

development, the United States had a patent on radar from work
that was done by the Bureau of Standards when they were doing
experiments on the Potomac River, transmission of microwave
energy, and they noticed that whenever a ship went by the beam
was interrupted. The transmission was interrupted, and then they
actually found that the transmission was reflected. They saw
that back in the early thirties.

So the concept was pretty well known, but the

instrumentation to make it workyou know, that was the real
problem. And so you had transmitting power systems that could
electrocute you in the laboratory if you didn t watch what you
were doing. And these would transmit very high wattage,
hundreds, thousands of watts. And then, coming back, you would
be looking for reflections which were down around ten-to-the-
minus twelve or fourteen watts. So you had a range of ten-to-
the-minus seventeenth in power out and to power received back.
So it was a really difficult problem. You had to develop
receivers.

So we were taught power transmission out--and this was a

pulse of energy, incidentally, and not constant transmission, not
like we have in our electricity at home. And then you had the
receivers and you had all of the devices that indicated range and
 147

directiondirection being, of course, very eisy. And then you

had all kinds of theoretical problems involving the transmission
antennas, the parabolic antennas, and so on. You had hands-on
activity with real, working systems.

I remember one night a major storm came by, and with the
radar we were tracking the clouds which were of course filled
with water. They showed up great on the radar screens
[chuckles]. So after two months, why, we went back to the
laboratory. But in those two months of being down there, it was
just another part of my education over all, but it was also the
education in terms of the history of Boston and New England
history.

Harbor Building was just three or four blocks away from

Faneuil Hall and a famous restaurant is still there, nearby
building, Durgin Park. This was, of course, during the war.
Very few people then. If you go there today, this is a big
tourist area. But we would go upstairs, where Durgin Park
Restaurant was located, and we would have a meal. I met a
waitress there, older woman, Marie, very outgoing. Wanted me to
sit at her table, and we had long tables. Then we had some small
tables, but the long tables were the main thing.

Politicians would come down in the other direction from

Beacon Hill. I remember once having dinner there with Leverett
Saltonstall when he was the senator of the United States. He was
telling me what I should order. His favorite was a horrible-
looking mess called Indian pudding, which is cornmeal with
molasses. It s an acquired taste, really! But we would go there
quite religiously because it was a good bargain during those
days. Luncheon would be about fifty cents.

Later on, when we were married, Doris and I would go, and
always be greeted by Marie. It was very valuable that we had
that contact because if the restaurant had steaks, which were, of
course, rationed, why, she would whisper, have filets
"We

tonight." Of course, we would order a filet [chuckles]. But we

had just a wonderful time over the years, and I have often gone
back there when I visited Boston, MIT, after the laboratory
experience.

But Faneuil Hall was a short walk, and a slightly different

direction was North Church, where the lanterns were raised, and
nearby was Paul Revere s house. We had all of these things. You
know, the old South Church was there. And then, of course, City
Hall for the city of Boston, which is a historic spot where the
Boston Massacre occurred during the Revolutionary days. Anyway,
 U8

I just wandered all over that part of Boston, learning all about
Boston.

Three Months to Provide Radar 582 for the Panama Canal

Maslach: So got back to the lab and I got my first job, which is
I

mentioned slightly in that book about the laboratory, and that

was that there was a need to provide the Panama Canal with radar.
I was told that 1 had three months in which to design, build and
ship three antennas and three sets of receivers. I didn t know
what that meant, really. I never had a job like that, and so I

just got going. I went to see other people in the laboratory, to

see what they were doing--

Maslach: In the early days, we were outnumbered enormously by physicists,

and so I just got to know so many of these people. They were
later major figures in the Cold War and also in the postwar
electronics scene. I just cited Luis Alvarez as one, but there
were many others as well.

I started working and, as I said, we worked five and a half

days, but everybody worked more than that. I would be there

quite often late at night, and I designed the antennas and then I
had to have a certain amount of work done by drafting and then in
shops. Well, I won t bore you with all the projects 1 had, but
I

Swent : No, I would like to hear about some of them, at least.

Maslach: Well, I ll put in a couple. But that was the first major one and
it had a major impact. I did get it out in three months, and I
did learn about shops and getting work done. And in a short
time because I do have a prodigious appetite to solve problems--
I was soon using about half the shop time for all of Division Ten
[chuckles) and about two-thirds of all of the draftsmen. I had
all of these people working for me, and I suddenly realized
(later) that I was in administration. I mean, when you have a
dozen draftsmen and you had to talk to them every day and you had
a dozen people in the shop and you had to check them every day,
on your projects and what was being done, there was an
introduction essentially to middle management, I ll call it.

Swent: I had one question. I guess maybe this is the time to ask it.
In the Five Year book, it said that you developed and engineered
 149

radar components for production and that the work was

particularly sensitive to tactical uses; that you theretore did
much tactical thinking to be ready to meet systems or service
requests. I wondered if you wanted to expand on this.

Maslach: Yes. In that first big job, which of course was right there in
1942, I noticed one time, in what they called the "roof
laboratory," which is mentioned many times in this bookthat was
the original laboratory, where the first radars were set up. I
would go up there because it was an exciting place to be,
especially at night time because they had all kinds of people who
left their desk and would come up and play around with the
systems and watch what was happening.

I recall seeing a smaller radar that had been hoisted up

into what was called a "radome." It was a device that sheltered
the radar from the elements. You lost- transmission power through
this skin device, and you lost receiving power, of course, coming
in, so radomes were not useful devices except for protection.
Long after radar was developing, why, they were developing only
radars that could stand out in the elements. Mine, 582 for
Panama, was designed to stay out in the elements. But looking at
them raising that radar, and I thought, "Gee, that s kind of
"

interesting.

The problem early on in radar was to learn where to situate

the radar because valleys and hills can give false readings. You
can get reflections, ghosts, and everything else. So just saying
they could put it on top of a mountain isn t the proper answer.
They really had to look and see where to mount the radar. I had
the idea of mounting the 582 antenna on a truck. I m using that
number because that gives you a way to index it. There are some
pictures there of the 582 on a truck. And essentially we just
used yachting equipment to raise the antenna through the roof of
this truck. One of the three antennas that went to Panama was so
organized and the historical value was that the big production
584, which came on a year later, was done by General Motors, and
was a truck-mounted radar and they had a regular hydraulic lift
system that took the radar right through the roof. It looked
just like mine, only a lot more sophisticated [laughs].

Swent : You used the term, "yachting equipment"?

Maslach: Yes.

Swent: Just what they used on yachts.

Maslach: Yes. Blocks and tackles and so on.

 150

Swent :
Okay, all right.

Maslach: I knew all about sailing [chuckles] so that s what I did. I

always remember going up to that roof laboratory because, as 1
said, it was so exciting. I remember one time we had a new
radar, very powerful, and it just went around in a circle. The
first time it went around the circle, it was pointing up to an
areathere was this bridge called Cottage Farm Bridge.
Industrial building up there, and it had a lot of lighting
equipment on the roof, which of course was not used during the
war because of blackouts. But the power transmitter part of that
radar would light up an entire side. So all of a sudden, that
sign was on and it was off. So we would go back and forth
lighting that sign [laughs]. We had a lot of fun during those
times; it was new to everybody. "Gee, we could have that much
power. We can light that."

As I said, it was a very, very exciting time.

Marblehead and Yachting with Charles Francis Adams

Swent: It must have been.

Maslach: I augmented the excitement of the laboratory by constantly

traveling and looking at things on Saturday afternoons and
Sundays. For example, one of my favorite places (still is) is to
go from Boston up to Marblehead. It s a big yachting center.
Beautiful, natural harbor, and a great historical town.
Cemeteries, museums and so on. In fact, the famous painting of
the Spirit of 76 stands about ten feet high and about seven
feet wide, and it has the drummer boy and the old man on the fife
and so on, and someone carrying the flag. That was drawn--!
mean, painted--by a semi-primitive artist in Marblehead, and for
years they had it right there in the Marblehead city hall, right
in the main office. They had plexiglass to protect it from the
people who were working there. But there was this famous
painting. Now they have it in a worse location, in the same
building, in the basement. But one room, and there it is. You
think of it as a great historical thing, and it s treated as
something rather simple.

But I would walk around Marblehead. In the beginning, you

could take a train from North Station to Marblehead, but then
they did away with the train and you had to take a bus up there.
But I would buy the newspaper on Sunday and go up there after
 151

breakfast . Sit up there in the parks and so on and watch the

yachting.

To stay on that same subject, I took a week off the first

week of August because I had met someone sailing down at MIT in
the basin where there were the small dinghies that they would
race on Saturday afternoons. He had a boat up in Marblehead, and
there would be a regatta, Marblehead Week, so I thought it would
be a good, one-week vacation. So I took off and went up there.
He and a bunch of other men rented a small house on Marblehead
Neck, where the two yacht clubs were. The Corinthian was the one
that we sailed out of.

And Saturday morning we sailed our first race, and we came

in second. His boat was not well maintained and was rather
leaky, but we were constantly beaten by a boat that was well
maintained and in good shape. But we- had second places all
through the whole week [chuckles], which was quite good.

We were sitting in the yacht club, having a sandwich and a

beer, and we were rather conspicuous because we were two men in
the twenties, during the wartime, who looked like able-bodied
people, you know [chuckles]. So a man, an older man, came from
one of the nearby tables and he was a chunky New Englander, with
a New England accent, and asked if we were busy that afternoon
sailing or were we available as a crew. The man that owned the
boat said he was going back to Boston because he had to have a
sail repaired. I said, "Well, I m free." So he said, "When
you re finished, could you come over and sit with us?"

said, "Okay."
I I looked over there, and it was two older
men. mean, one was quite old, in his seventies, eighties.
I I
shouldn t say it that way now that I m seventy-eight. But he was
small and quiet. And another man was there, who lived on
Marblehead Neck. So after our lunch I walked over and introduced
myself, sat down. And lo and behold, I was talking to a
legendary figure, Charles Francis Adams.

Swent: My goodness!

Maslach: Charles Francis Adams had been secretary of the navy and a
variety of other things. Had been one of the great yachtsmen in
the defense of the America Cup in the twenties and the teens of
the 20th century, and had his own big boats, and so on. He was a
major, major figure historically because he s a direct descendant
of John Adams and John Quincy Adams. So I couldn t believe it,
you know? [chuckles] The man that had come over and asked if we
were available was actually his boatman, who later, I found out,
was also his chauffeur [chuckles]. And that other old man there
 152

with him--I have forgotten his name--it was a New England name.
I kind of lean toward something like Payne, but I m not sure, so
I can t say what his name was. But he had a big cruising
sailboat there.

What they were looking for was some strong back and weak
mind because Charles Francis Adams owned a thirty-square-meter,
which is the largest that they sail out of Marblehead during
Marblehead Week. It s actually about forty feet in length and
only about eight feet wide and about six feet deep. It s a very
unique boat. It was developed in Sweden. Has a mast that runs
straight up and then curves at the very top. It s a very small
sail area. Thirty square meters was the sail area. Beautiful
yachts. His, of course, was a wooden hull which was polished
mahogany, you know, varnished. It was just fabulous.

So we--the chunky man took me downstairs and went into a

locker and found a sweater which was the sweater they all were
wearing [chuckles], so I had the uniform of the boat, and we went
out. Well, it was no contest. Charles Francis Adams just was so
good and everybody else was so mediocre. You know, his boat was
so perfectly maintained. He knew his sailing; he knew his
strategy and everything else.

The other man--the boatman and I handled jib sheets, and the
older man handled the main, and Charles Francis Adams was at the
tiller. No spinnakers. Wartime rules. He was so far ahead when
he finished, it was ridiculous. And he won every race during the
week.

So we came back, went to the bar and had a drink, and he was
signing. He told the bartender that I could sign for anything
and just sign his name as well, under it. And so I signed
something for the bartender so he would recognize my signature,
and I had carte blanche at the club for meals, drinks, and
whatever .

Well, just before I was ready to go home, which was a short

walk, Mrs. Adams came in, so she asked where I was living, and I
told her we had taken over this empty house and had sleeping bags
and air mattresses [chuckles] and so on. We had food for
breakfast and stuff like that. So she said, "Well, you must know
Mrs. So-and-so." Well, I didn t. She s in the house right next
door, the one with the white picket fence, beautiful New England
cottage. Fabulous yard and the flowers. You couldn t believe
the gardening that she did. And she was friendly with her, a
younger woman, of course.
 153

She said, "Why don t you ask her to come down to the buffet
and the dance tonight?" There was a dance. This was the opening
of Marblehead Week, Saturday night. So I walked over and found
her in the garden, gardening, and I transmitted that the Adamses
would like to have her come down to the dance and buffet dinner.
She was so, so thrilled. She was about forty years old. Her
husband was in the navy in the Atlantic somewhere, on active
duty.

We decided we would meet at six o clock, whatever it was.

And go down. We were told, actually, when to come. But I have
forgotten the precise time. But we went down, and she was just a
wonderful reservoir of information about Marblehead and
Marblehead Neck and yachting and everything else. They owned a
boat, but it was not in the water because he was on active duty.

We had this buffet dinner and we had dancing with a good

orchestra. What they did while we were having dinner was they
turned on the switch which turned on the lights. Truly you felt
like you were in the days of the Great Gatsby. Hundreds of
Japanese lanterns, paper spheres, were strung out all over those
acres of grass between these two clubs. Big, big clubs. And
they were lit. This wonderful lighting of all this color, you
know. These lanterns with their paper patterns. I always
remember it was just fabulous. Never saw anything like that.

Swent : What about the blackout?

Maslach: Well, Marblehead was on an inside, facing the land. Marblehead

Neck, I should say. And was facing Marblehead and was actually
screened away from the shipping lanes, and so on.

Swent: So they could do that.

Maslach: They did it for a short time. I don t know how long they had it
on. But I always remember those Japanese lanterns. And it was a
piece of New England and East Coast that you just don t see-
never saw here on the Pacific Coast.

Swent: No.

Maslach: So anyway, she was obviously a very good friend of Mrs. Adams.
They spoke a lot. She volunteered to escort me or guide me in
Marblehead, and I told her I had been in Marblehead several times
already [chuckles] and walked around, and I knew quite a bit
about Marblehead. She checked me out and did find that I knew
quite a bit [chuckles].
 154

But Monday was a day off. We sailed on--I sailed on S mday

morning and Sunday afternoon, and then Monday was a day off. But
then we sailed Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday,
and Sunday. Adams proposed that I drive with him down home. He
would take me to my house. His house was down in Quincy, which
is on the southern end of Boston, right on the northern end,
really, of the Cape Cod region. He had an enormous place down
there called the Tules, the marshlands. And so here I am, being
driven in this big limousine [chuckles], with a chauffeur, and
Charles Francis Adams and his wife and I in the back seat, and I
get driven up to my little old rooming house on Beacon Street
[laughs]. So that was a fantastic experience in learning about
New England.

Swent : Wonderful experience.

Elizabeth Blaney

Maslach: But it was to be overshadowed by the fact that one of ray drafting
people was a woman by the name of Elizabeth Blaney. She was a
tall woman, had graduated from Vassar, had a degree in landscape
architecture and therefore had drafting talents, but entirely
different from mechanical drawing in terms of talents. She had
volunteered, and they had taken her. The Blaney family occupied
several pages in the social register. Sir Henry Blaney stepped
ashore on Blaney Beach, near Swampscott, which is near
Marblehead, with his three-ship armada in early 1700 and became a
major figure in Boston society, as well as an industrialist of
the times.

The Blaney family of the moment, when I was there, in the

forties, was headed up by Dwight Blaney, who looked like Monty
Woolley in that old comedy, The Man Who Came to Dinner. He had
that square-cut beard, a white beard. Handsome man, shorter
stature. Getting quite old but still very, very feisty. And he
was a draftsman, and his draftsman companion was John Singer
Sargent.

So the two of them went on a sketching tour in England back

in early 1900s, maybe in the 1890s, for all I know. And along
the way, they met the Hill family. I notice in this last copy of
the American Heritage, the historical magazine that I take, that
Hill is listed as one of the top forty most wealthy people. He
was a partner and a friend of John P. Morgan and had a big piece
of the New York Central Railroad and the Boston-New York
Steamship Lines and so on, so they were a very wealthy family.
 155

So Sargent and Blaney kind of toured along with him every

once in a while because the Hills had three daughters. The
daughters were enamored of these two artists [chuckles].
Eventually, Dwight married one of the Hill girls. He went from
penniless draftsman in Boston, with at least two or three pages
already in the social registerhe had the name but no moneyso
suddenly he was a multimillionaire.

He used the money very wisely. Continued his art work, and
he won major prizes. He won the gold medal, for example, in the
1915 San Francisco Panama-Pacific Exposition, for an oil painting
he did of an island that he owned up in Bar Harbor called
Ironbound. A thousand-acre island.

Libby kind of adopted me. She was very impressed with the
fact that I had already been to all of these different places.
The Bunker Hill monument, which she had never been to [chuckles].
And viewed "Old Ironsides" and things "like that. I had spent a
week sailing up there in Marblehead.

The Blaneys had two houses on Louisburg Square, Beacon Hill,

which was the address to have when you re in Boston. The family
originally had six children, Libby being the youngest. Two died
fairly early. One woman went on to head up the American Red
Cross, and another man, who was still alive when I was there,
David Blaney--and I got to know him and his family very well. In
fact, I m still in contact with his children, one of whom is
living out here on the Pacific Coast.

Well, we were introduced to Boston society within that

framework in a way that you just could not imagine. You have to
read The Late George Apley and The Proper Bostonians and so on to
get some idea of what we were talking about. This man had two
houses filled with the most beautiful antique furniture from the
Colonial days that you ever saw. In fact, he had a fetish about
not sending anything out to be repaired because they would steal
most of it and send you back part of it. There were such
instances. Everything in the house was a first edition book or a
painting. He had lots of John Singer Sargents, all inscribed "To

my friend, Dwight," and so on. It was like living in a museum.

Later on, of course, when Doris came--it was March of the

next year, 1943--why, she was adopted by Libby. She was our maid
of honor [chuckles] at the wedding, and she arranged everything.

So I was invited down to their house in Weston. Since you

have been to Wellesley, you know where Weston is.

Swent: Yes.
 156

Maslach: If you re in Wellesley, it s called the Weston Road; and if

you re in Weston, it s called the Wellesley Road.

Swent: Right [chuckles].

Maslach: It does connect the two towns. And about halfway between them,
just before you get to the Worcester Turnpike, there was this
beautiful house built 1700, roughly, and it s off to the side.
It s just a fabulous museum of its own. I remember she invited a
bunch of us--and she called us her "California barbarians"--down
there, and we had a wonderful buffet and just an afternoon and
evening down there. It was about half a dozen of us from
California who went down there. Again, a museum. Just the most
beautiful guns andthere was a big buttermold that was used for
a famous banquet for Lafayette when he came to the United States.
And there were long rifles, you know, with the barrels six feet
long and stuff like that. It was just a fabulous thing to see.
You know, you didn t expect this. In fact, 90 percent or the
people I knew that came to Boston never had any of these
experiences. I realize that a lot of it is due to chance, but
also a large part of it is due to the fact that I am outgoing and
I talk to people.

So when I was down there, for example, at the Harbor

Building, taking radar school, why, just a couple of blocks north
of the Harbor Building was T Wharf. Well, not the famous tea, t-
e-a, but shaped like a T. It had this big long loft building on
the water, which they had carved up into apartments. So she
introduced me to a man, Ed Meyer, architect, and his wife,
Marjorie, and we became very close friends. In fact, we visited
there and they visited here up to the last few years. Marjorie
Meyer died at age eighty-eight about three years ago. You know,
they were an entirely different class of people.

My work in radar antennas, radomes, and receivers was

augmented by work for other things, on trainers, training people
how to use radar, which is one of the groups in this volume of
Five Years. Ray Carman was the head of it.

Swent: In the book it just used initials, R.L. Carman, so it was Ray
Carman.

Maslach: Yes, Ray Carman. He and I became quite close.

Swent: He was the leader of Group Sixty-Four.

 157

Fran Hagerty, Builder of Radomes

Maslach: Right. So I did work for Group Sixty-Four, Group Sixty-Three,

and Division Ten and on and on and on. And to give you some idea
of the things that happenedyou said you wanted a couple of
examples. Well, we designed these plywood radomes using a firm
down in Cohasset called Hagerty Construction or whatever. Fran
Hagerty was another part of New England history. He represents
the Irish. They were well-to-do Irish. His mother lived in
Cohasset in a beautiful historic home, very, very modern, ultra
modern, designed by Marcel Breuer. He was a famous architect in
Germany. Came to MIT. He was one of the leaders of what in
Germany was called the Bauhaus movement, modern architecture.
Most famous for his design of the Barcelona House in the
Barcelona World s Fair. You probably have seen the chairs of
chromium and black leather, very springy and very comfortable.
Well, those are Breuer chairs, Barcelona chairs.

I would stay down at the house and look out and there was
Minot Light, a big lighthouse, right out on an island a mile or
two away, and enjoy wonderful food at Hugo s, the restaurant
there in Cohasset. I worked with Fran on the design of radomes
and the manufacturing of them. He had a shop in which he almost
as a career of his owndesigned and built pulling boats,
including eight-man shells, you know, for colleges and
universities. He was trying to compete with Pocock, who was the
big pulling boat manufacturer up in Seattle, who made the best
boats at that time.

**

Maslach: Fran Hagerty was just a wonderful, wonderful person. He had this
wonderful Irish face and he was a great oarsman and therefore a
great athlete and he lived the kind of life that you would expect
somebody like that, with all that energy, to live. He had this
facility, and he had ability to work with very thin plywood. He
was a natural and made many radomes for the war effort, to
protect what was then considered to be secret and/or fragile in
the antennas. After, we then just put antennas outdoors.

You can still see radomes some of them, I m Sure, were

built by Hagerty up on mountaintops. For example, there s a
whole series of them up on Mt Tamalpais, and there are some up
.

on Mt. Diablo. They re used mainly to shelter microwave

transmission equipment, which was not designed to be outdoors.

At any rate, I got to know Hagerty, and I got to know

another slice of New England. He knew Libby Blaney because the
 158

Hagertys lived in Boston, up on Beacon Hill. I would go down to

Cohasset quite often on a Friday or a Saturday and spend a half
day Saturday and then the weekend with him. 1 would see Cohasset
and Scituate, which are two beautiful coastal New England towns.
The church in Cohasset was built by shipwrights, and you can see
the curved ceiling with the ribs and so on. It s just like a
boat, upside down.

Designing the Base for Radar Antennas, a Free-Wheeling Operation

Maslach: I want to give you one example of the free-wheeling operation

that MIT was. The book gives a false impression because it gives
only the outline, skeleton, of all these divisions: the theory
division and so on. Well, for example, Ernie Martinelli, whom I
knew from Berkeley, was in the antenna group. One day, one of
his colleagues was having a problem with an antenna design, to be
used for navigational purposes. So Ernie just told him, over
"Go

to see George."

I remember a Friday afternoon [chuckles], and this guy walks

in, a physicist. I could look up his name, but I have forgotten
it, really. He was carrying two packages. One was like a
monstrous bird cage; the other package was wrapped up and I
couldn t see what was in it. He put down this bird cage, which
sat on a platform and was about five feet high and kind of just
vibrated back and forth. I m looking at it [chuckles], and he
takes out and unwraps two antennas that fitted onto this
birdcage: one vertically upwards, on the upper side; and one
vertically downwards, on the lower side.

I recognized the antennas, of course, because I had taken

radar school and I could talk his language. I knew all about
interference and everything else, and patterns and what have you.
So I said, "What s the problem?"

He said, "Put your foot down on this base." I put my foot

down and he put his foot down on the other side. Just pushed it
with his finger, and the thing just vibrated, oscillated, you
know. I m not exaggerating. It oscillated in an arc of maybe
six inches. I said, "Okay."

And so [chuckles] he said, "This is supposed to be mounted

on top of towers, like flag poles, at airports and other
strategic areas and will be part of a network to be mounted on
towers all throughout the world, as navigational aids." You
know, "Ernie said you knew all about mechanical engineering,
 159

structures and winds. You re a yachtsman, and so you would know

what would happen to this thing in a wind." And he said, "This
was designed by a radio company." I won t mention the name;
they re still in business [chuckles]. "But they don t have any
mechanical engineers."

I said, "What s the time schedule?"

He said, "Well, you know, it was supposed to have been

finished last month."

I said, "You can take the antennas, but can you leave that
structure?"

He said, "Yes."

So I said, might get to it in. a couple of days or next

"I

week. I have got to finish this up. It s due next week, and I
want to make my schedule."

I just sat there after I worked on my work, and I kept

So
looking at this stupid thing, and then I Saturday morning, a
major storm had come in. I remember getting over there to MIT
across the Mass Avenue bridge, which was a horrible bridge to
cross because the wind came down the river; I would just freeze.
So I remember getting over there. This is the fall or
wintertime. Saturday. And I just looked at this crazy thing. It
just bothered me, you know? So I just finished my work Saturday,
and I had about an hour, so I just sat, looking at this thing and
thinking how I would design it.

Getting ready to quit. Looked outside, and the weather was

miserable, so I just stayed there, and I started designing. And
I stayed there through dinner. I think I left about ten o clock
at night [chuckles], when the storm abated a little. I couldn t
face that Mass Avenue Bridge with the heavy wind. There was very
bad transportation. There was an old streetcar that went on Mass
Avenue Bridge. They did away with that, and they had buses, but
off hours and weekends, transportation was really very, very
poor. The subways were the big things, and the rest of the time
you walked.

So stayed there half the night, and I got there Sunday

I

morning, and I kept working. I stayed there Sunday night. So I

took two ten-hour days plusyou know, just finished the whole
thing. It wasn t much to the design. But years and years later,
you know, through the years after I had finished that work, why,
I could go to airports and spot the antennas. Now you can t see
any. They have got all kinds of new, modern ones. Much better
 160

design. They re smaller and everything else, But I could spot

these things everywhere.

Contributing to the Design of Glide Control Approach Radar

Swent : Based on your design.

Maslach: Yes. And the important thing I want to emphasize here is that a
man that I don t even know from a division way over there comes
over and talks to me, and that s how something got done, and
that s the way the entire lab was. Luis Alvarez came to me many
times, and he was such a wonderful character. Brilliant,
absolutely brilliant. And he s the man that designed the radar
system called glide control approach. This is a technique
whereby you would talk down a plane by using ground radar, and
you would have the flight path all laid out.

I have landed in planes in storms that have used that glide

control approach, and thank God for Luis Alvarez. He wen the
Collier trophy, which was the premier aerodynamics trophy, for
his design of that equipment, which had two big antennas, very
strange-looking antennas they used to bring the ship down. I
contributed not in the antenna design but in the receiver designs
and the plan position indicator designs within the control room.

Basically, you have a rotating arm, lighted arm, as they

show here, like that [demonstrating], and if there s a target, it
would show up as a blip. There would be a target here. Well,
that would be your aircraft, and you would want to bring it down.
What you would do is you would have a plastic plate over this
radar, showing the glide path, the path that that blip ought to
follow in order to come down to ground. I m using a plan
position indicator to show that what they used for two
oscillating antennas that went back and forth, like this
[demonstrating], and they would bring it down. I did the work on
that plan position indicator console and the devices on it.

DesigninR a Plan Position Indicator Console for Use on Ships

Maslach: One of the items that I was proud of and went into big production
was for a navy job; they wanted repeater indicators. In other
words, repeater scopes, which they could have taking signals on
board ship from the command center, the CIC room, to various
 161

locations on the ship. Of course, you d want to have a couple up

there on the bridge; then you d want to have some at the gunnery
control areas and so on.

So this was sort of a separate indicator. Separate

indicator, which could be used around the ship. I enjoyed that
design. It just happened to be--I happened to be in a good
state. I don t know why [chuckles]. But it was later in my
career in MIT. And I designed a console, about the size of this
chair but up high, to the size--solid--up to the height of this
table. The features were panels around the side which could be
quickly removed by aircraft-type fasteners, which I thought was a
nice little touch. You did not need tools to work on this piece
of equipment.

I credited the fact that I knew a lot about shipboard life,

from my yachting work. You know, if you re going to work on that
indicator, you want to use both hands^ The old adage on ships is
one hand for yourself and one for the ship. And so if you re
trying to use a screwdriver or something to take out a long
screw, this is a miserable job to do on a ship, so you want
everything to be handled quickly; you don t have to have special
tools, and so on.

And then on the top, which was the best part of it, I had
aluminum casting which was about two feet long and about sixteen,
eighteen inches wide. I had the plan position indicator
centered, which was circular, and room for the various controls.
You don t have many on a repeater. On the CIC are the indicators
that control much of what is coming out, so you only need to
increase brightness and darken it and this and that.

The Importance of Handgrips in the Design

Maslach: But there was one key feature, and that [chuckles] was very
simple: That is that if your forward edge on this--! 11 use this
chair--the forward edge of this casting, on either side, I put in
a handgrip. I cast in slots. I had a big hand, so I made it

large enough to get my hand, or maybe a little bit more, and so I

had these two handgrips in there. People couldn t understand why
I did that. I had all kinds of other little gizmos in there,
which I knew would help.

When they made the prototype and then they made about ten
copies, why, the copies went out to the various testing groups in
the navy, and some, of course, went immediately onto aircraft
 162

carriers or something and they were being used at sea. Well,

when the report came back on that design [chuckles] of those
repeaters, they thought it was a great design. It was just
perfect, just what they wanted, and ordered umpteen thousand, you
know. I m not joking.

All of a sudden, two thousand of these indicators are being

built. The one thing they mentioned [chuckles], they
highlighted, was the handgripi Well, I knew that at sea the
.

ship rolls and yaws and pitches and so on, and you want to look
straight down and you want to look at it as a map, essentially,
and you want to have something to hang onto. And so they could
bolt the thing down. I had arranged the bolting at the base, and

they had this handgrip. Those handgrips [chuckles] were probably

one of the best thoughts I ever had on design [chuckles], I
never heard so many comments. I had mail. I had people telling
me about it years later because I went to an organization years
later, which was still doing radar work. But that was just kind
of a funny side issue. It wasn t even my main project.

Jerome Wiesner and Designing for Airborne Early Warning Radar

Maslach: But you met so many people. And this is what I--I want to get
some people in here. For example, my neighbor where we later
lived, my wife and I later lived, on Hereford Street in Boston.
Right around the corner on Beacon Street was Jerry [Jerome]
Wiesner and his wife, you ll get it out of the Five Year[s] book.
Jerome Wiesner. He later became president of MIT and then was
science advisor to [President John F.] Kennedy. Very close to
the Kennedy family.

So every once in a while Jerry and I would walk across the

bridge together, walk home, you know, and stuff like that. We
would get talking. Of course, you re walking along and "What are
you doing?" And I would tell him about this indicator, which I
kind of liked. And he says, need you." He was the project
"I

leader for airborne early radar, early warning radar. You ve

seen pictures of this strange, large aircraft, which by itself
was not strange but had a strange shape. On the top there s a
big round dome on the top. It s like a dish, like a saucer,
flying saucer. It s about twenty feet in diameter.

And here s this beautiful aircraft body, with this

extraordinary [chuckles] protuberance up there. Well, that s the
antenna for very sophisticated early warning radar. You can keep
these ships up there for a long time, and they have as much or
 163

more power to identify aircraft and guide aircraft as any airport

in the United States. It s really--you can have a dozen people
up there, among indicators, working. Very sophisticated
indicators now, but this was the first project, and we had an old
beat-up, wrecked fuselage of the plane that this was going to be
installed in. It was out there in one of the garages.

My job eventually was to fill the sides with these

indicators. They liked my navy indicator and all of its little
features, so here it was different. People in chairs were
strapped down and they re looking at a vertical tube, slightly
canted, really. And using all kinds of strategic devices on the
face of that tube for giving instructions to aircraft that were
going to attack and so on. So this was a very, very
sophisticated program. It was at the end of the Rad Lab period.
It was maybe 1945. But it became a major item in our arsenal,
and we still see these planes all over the world. See pictures
of these planes.

I use that just as another example of how just talking to

somebody and here you are involved in another project. And

everybody was allowed to do this kind of moonlighting in other
areas. It was encouraged. The place was just five thousand
minds, loosely organized in divisions and groups, who were
constantly thinking about projects and had friends everywhere who
would tell you about their work.

Swent : You mentioned this intensive course that you had at the
beginning, with lectures and labs. Was there formal instruction
after that at all?

Maslach: No.

Education Seminars

Swent: Seminars?

Maslach: We had seminars. The Zacharias seminar, as it became known, was

a voluntary thing. I attended it quite regularly, just to keep
up to date. Then every Monday night we had a seminar for the
entire laboratory in the big auditorium at MIT. These were sort
of sessions to keep you up to date on what was happening in the
world. For example, I always will remember that historic seminar
when Sir Watson Watt of England came over. He was the man who
many call the father of radar. His claim to fame was that he
took the magnetron, which is the power tube that shapes and puts
 164

out the pulse of energy, and what he did was he strapped the
magnetron--he had a wire circle, which contacted each of the
poles in this magnetron. There are pictures in this book,
especially, of the magnetron and what its shape looked like.
That, in fact [showing photo], is the picture of the magnetron.

Swent : It s the one on the cover of the Five year book.

Maslach: Those are the pole pieces. 1 want to see now. This doesn t show
the strapping [laughs]. This is what Sir Watson Watt did and was
able to increase the power out of the magnetron at those
microwave frequencies by a factor of, oh, a thousand. This is
the one thing that the Germans, who were doing the same kind of
research, never found out. They stopped their research in this
microwave area. So that s one of the reasons we have the great
advantage over both the Germans and the Japanese.

The people are--they made the laboratory. The director was

Lee DuBridge, who was a professor from University of Rochester,
physics, well known for books that he wrote: a Physics Society
sponsored series of books on physics. His associate director was
F. W. Loomis. Lee DuBridge was Mr. Outside: a suave, worldly
man, well spoken, handsome, gregarious. Just would come right up
and shake your hand. And so you just met Lee DuBridge just
automatically, everywhere.

F. Wheeler Loomis was a grizzled-looking New Englander type,

but he was from Indiana, probably a good Midwestern type. He had
white fringes of hair on his head, which was rapidly balding, and
he had a very stern visage. He would be the Mr. Inside man who
administered. Free-Wheeling Loomis was his nickname, from his
initials, F. W. He really encouraged everything. He and Lee
just--everything you wanted to do, "Great!" That was it!

There was a period there that I wanted to get out of the

laboratory. I felt that I wasn t doing enough for the war
effort, and I thought that I should volunteer for one of the
military forces, since there was a constant contact with the navy
and so on and since I had at one time thought of going to
Annapolis, when I was young. So F. Wheeler Loomis gave me his
speech. It was the speech that he gave to many other people,
young people like me. It was called the Masses of Manpower
speech, which is the way you get something done, the way you win
a war is that you need masses of manpower to do something. And
you re just going to go out there and fritter away your life
doing nothing with some big organization because they re not
ready to use you, where here you are doing fantastic work, and so
on and so on, you know. So he kind of combined shaming you and
praising you [laughs]. You stayed [laughs].
 165

One of the other persons who I saw last at the fiftieth

anniversary of the laboratory, in which we received that Five
Year volume roughly 40 to 90--so anyway, the man s name is
Purcell. He s a major character in this other book because
Purcell later, after the laboratory, went to Harvard and worked
there in development of their cyclotron, and then he started
using instrumentation that had been developed at the Rad Lab and
he won a Nobel Prize. The lab always is proud of how many people
on their staff eventually won Nobel Prizes. McMillan, for
example, here at Berkeley, and Luis Alvarez here at Berkeley were
at the laboratory. And Purcell and others. It just goes on and
on.

Purcell and I were look-alikes. He was about six foot four,

and so was I. And we were both slender, and we both had a big
mass of blondish hair, which was kind of not well combed. People
would go down the hallway of one of these temporary buildings and
slap you on the back and say, "Hey, you ve got a great idea!"
I d turn around and say, "But my name is not Purcell." [laughs]
We used to joke about it because there were so many ways that
people made mistakes with the two of us.

And we were quite the opposite. He was a very finely-

trained, fantastically able theoretical and experimental
physicist, and I was [chuckles] a mechanical engineer, so we were
quite different.

I. I. Rabi

Maslach: I want to throw in a kind of little humorous story, which kind of

gives a little history, too, and also involves a Nobel Prize
winner. His name is I. I. Rabi. Came from Columbia University,
and he was head of the theory group. He had an office right next
door to Lee Haworth, who was division leader of Division Six.
These people were located in Building 24, up about the third or
fourth floor. One day I was called to Haworth s office because
one of the draftsmen I had, fairly young, was in danger of being
drafted, and the question was to what extent do we go to the bat
and try to keep him because drafting help was difficult to argue
for compared to a physicist or an engineer.

So I arrived up there, the office, and talked to Lee

Haworth, who later went on to head up one of the big laboratories
in the Atomic Energy Commission. Anyway, the problem was
complicated by the fact that one of Haworth s secretaries was the
girlfriend of my draftsman [chuckles], so if we lost him, we lost
 166

her, you know. And in many respects, she was more valuable than
he was [chuckles], so the discussion was kind of strange. We
were in this office, and we were crouched over in the corner, as
far away from the office door as we could be, so they couldn t
overhear us outside.

And we were discussing this strange problem of what to do

with the draft board. Now, it didn t last very long because we
were interrupted by all kinds of noise outside, in the hallways
and everywhere. Suddenly, there s a knock and the door opens,
and Haworth s private secretary came in. A wonderful woman. And
she just said, "THE WAR IS OVER!" The war is over! Well, that
was the day that Germany capitulated. Of course, it was a
fantastic achievement, of course. Historical. So we were just
dancing around there, and just talking to each other, slapping
each other on the back and so on.

Lee Haworth was a chain smoker, and the entire time we were
there he was using one of these little machines and you put a
piece of cigarette paper down and fill it with tobacco, and it
rolls it, you know, and it automatically made it a kind of a
bum s cigarette, you know. So we were watching him while we were
talking.

People were leaving and coming in and so on, and Lee opened
the door, which went sideways to the next office. Knocked on the
door first and then he just opened the door. It was I. I. Rabi s
office. Rabi was in there. He was a very quiet man, except at
parties. He was a great party giver. And he s very quiet and
scholarly. So he was there with a visitor, and they were
talking. The visitor had to leave right away when he heard this
news. Rabi was sitting there [chuckles]. An oasis of quiet in
this building which was going crazy.

Ijust looked at him. We had met socially a couple of

times, seminars and so on. I said, "What are you going to do
when the lab is over?" He said, was thinking just exactly the
"I

same thing. What am I going to do? Well, I ll go back to my

laboratory at Columbia. I ll open my notebook and read the last
sentence that I wrote." That man did that. And within a year
won the Nobel Prize.

So what an experience for this young engineer! This great

laboratory, meeting the man that two years later is going to have
a Nobel Prize in physics. Nothing to do with what he had been
doing at the laboratory.

Swent: Picked up and went on.

 167

Maslach: He just picked up and went on. I ran into him a couple of times
here and there. He was at various meetings in Washington, D.C.,
and we always kind of reminisced. I kept up contact with Lee
DuBridge. He asked me--

Swent: Did he go to Caltech?

Maslach: He went to Caltech, where he was president for a long period of

time, then he became science advisor to [President Richard M. ]

Nixon. During that time, which will come out later, I was asked
to take a major job in Washington, so I was talking to him quite
a bit. He was using me, too, on committees for the science
advisor. So we were in contact. Last time I saw him was here at
the Faculty Club. Everybody was kind of surprised. He came over
to me, and we embraced and shook hands and so on. He died a few
years ago, a very, very sad death, to me, because he was truly a
major, major figure. He combined everything. He was a
renaissance man. He was a scientist; he was a writer; he was an
administrator; he was a politician; he was everything.

Maslach: He just worked with the Kennedys after Wiesner was science
advisor to the Kennedys. I m mixing that up. But anyway, he
just was a perfect gentleman. And he was so polished. Just
right for any kind of--he could walk into any organization, any
room, and the room was brighter. And he could talk with anybody.

Incidentally, there s another Loomis in this book, both

books, that should not be confused with F. Wheeler Loomis, who
was associate director. But there s an Alfred Loomis, who was a
very prominent lawyer, amateur scientist, gifted amateur
scientist, I should say, and very wealthy and very political. He
was close to the Roosevelts when the NDRC was formed, the
National Defense Research Council. They were, of course, our
bosses. The Rad Lab was one of the divisions of the NDRC.
Alfred Loomis, of course, visited every once in a while. But
Alfred Loomis and Lee DuBridge, as outside-men type, had great
influence on Roosevelt and others in this whole thing.

Help from Vannevar Bush

Maslach: Another person I met there just by chance--and he helped me in a

very strange waywas Vannevar Bush, who was the head of--his
name is in that bookhe was an MIT man, a craggy New Englander,
tall, and quiet type. He was the head of the NDRC. One day at
 168

MIT there, in a seminar, I was talking about the difficulty of

getting certain kinds of precision instrumentation work done,
that all of the shops I could go to--and I was going to shops in
the Berkshires, in Worcester, and anywhere and so Bush heard
this and he just said to me--I remember he grabbed my arm and
pulled me over to the side. He said, "Ihave a shop that I use
but I haven t been using it much down on Cape Cod." Off the main
area. This is an instrumentation shop. He said, d be very
"I

happy if you would send work to them because they re so far out
and away that nobody knows about them, but they re very, very
good people."

He gave me the name, and so I contacted them by telephone

and explained how I knew their name and so on, and I took the
train one day down to Hyannis and got off there at Hyannis, and
they picked me up in a beat-up little old car [chuckles], and
then we went off to some road way out in the woods, the pine
woods of Cape Cod [chuckles], and then they got this big barn
building and houses. It was a couple of brothers, and they had
this little shop.

The shop was absolutely an amazing place. It had

instrumentation and machine tool equipment for making, like,
watches and things like that. And they had designed the
instrumentation, the lathes and so on that were hand-made by
them. And these were now being used to make instruments. And,
yes, they could do certain work, but they could only do work
which was quite small, you know. That s very unique. And that s
what I wanted.

I gave them some blueprints of some things and asked them,

you know, this the sort of thing you can handle?" And they
"Is

went over things very conscientiously. They really put time in

on the drawings. So I would be sitting there waiting
[chuckles], and we d think about lunch. I had to make a train
schedule because there was only a couple of trains a day went to
Hyannis from Boston. So I used them for a variety of work. One
year I remember getting a Christmas card from Bush, thanking me
for the work that I had sent to them. Obviously, they were very
close to the Bush family.

Just so many strange things that were happening. For

example, I needed to have slip rings these are rings that are
copper or in my case they had to be silver, which are on a
rotating device which, of course, the radar antenna was. And
then you would have to have silver-carbon contact points on the
stationary side. So here s something rotating, going by, you
know, a contact point and transmitting electrical information
back to a stationary position.
 169

We tried copper and all kinds of forms of other material-

aluminum and a variety of things. It was obvious that silver was
the thing, and so 1 just one day picked up the phone and started
looking for silver. Well, there were silversmiths. New England
is just filled with silversmiths [chuckles]. I finally found
manufacturing and industrial silversmiths. I think the name was
Treat, Shreve and Lowe.
,

Swent : Shreve, Crump, and Lowe, maybe?

Maslach: They had a store right down on the Arlington and Boylston. I
always remember because Doris and I bought things there. Anyway,
it was the Shreve s of Boston. So I picked up the phone and
called the number, and I got some corporate office, and I
explained where I was and what I wanted to get done. "Oh, yes.
We do things like that." And then they put me in touch with the
person I should contact, which was down there in South Boston,
where they did manufacturing work, including cutlery and all
kinds of other things. Paul Revere would have been right at home
there, you know [chuckles).

So I got a car out of the car pool and drove over there
because it was a horrible place to get to. I just bought lots of
silver [chuckles] from Shreve Treat and Lowe--I raean--

Swent : There was a Shreve, Crump, and Lowe, I remember.

Maslach: In Boston? You ve got the right name. There s another silver
organization that had--

Swent : It might have been Shreve also.

Maslach: I had so much work that I had other organizations, and I would

just stumble into these things, you know. I really had a

wonderful relationship with that silver man. He thought I was
the greatest. Because I was a Californian, you know? Outgoing,
gregarious [chuckles] type, you know. I was too gregarious, of
course, because I had a shop out in South Boston that did sheet
metal work. Beautiful, beautiful sheet metal work. It was
entirely populated by Welshmen. The foreman was a Welshman with
a thick accent.

He educated me in how to use the telephone. I had been

months, you know, racing around, doing all these things and all
these projects. One day, I was calling him, I had a special idea
of something, and I wanted to know if it could be made. I didn t
know enough about sheet metal work, and this was shaping tubes
into circular and/or other strange kinds of shapes for structural
elements. I just called him up, and I recognized his voice, and
 170

I just started talking, "I have this idea," you know. I just
went on and on and on.

All of a sudden I stopped for a breath or something, and he

on the other end of the line said, "And who is this calling?" In
this wonderful Welsh tone. "What do you want to talk about?" And
"who do you want to talk to?" My comeuppance. So I apologized
[chuckles] . I told him [knocking on the table to emphasize the

points] exactly who I was, where I was calling from, what I

wanted to talk about and so on. I just relaxed. Because he
worked at that speed and not my speed. This was his way of being
polite. So I always remembered that. He was so wonderful.

To this day, I can still remember. And when I answer the

phone, after "hello" I just say who I am, like the British
system, "Maslach here." You just identify yourself. And when I
call--I used to make all my telephone calls--dean, provost, every
time I would make my own calls, and I would always start off with
who I was, where I was, and what I was calling about.

And he s the one that taught me that.

Marriage to Doris Cuneo, March 1943

Swent : Good idea.

Maslach: So it was quite a year or two. We got married in 1943, March.

Doris came. Fran Hagerty picked her up at the airport and
brought her to the Ritz-Carlton Hotel, where Doris and I met for
the first time in nine, ten months. She was fresh out of
California, March, first of March.

Swent : Had she graduated from the university?

Maslach: She had already graduated. She, in fact, graduated in "41, but
she was teaching, and she had her school contract and so on. So
she came from her teaching duties. She had gotten out of the
last semester of it. And came. We had sherry on the balcony of
the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Boston, looking out over the Public
Gardens [chuckles]. Fran was a great person to do that.

In the meantime, of course, as I told you, Elizabeth, Libby

Blaney, was taking over and planning our wedding and where it was
to be. She was so concerned that this woman had come to be
married in Boston and she came all alone, and without her mother
[laughs]. So Libby had Doris stay with her up on Beacon Hill.
 171

She had a beautiful bedroom, with all these antiques and what
have you. And so she stayed a week there before we actually got
married.

She [Blaney] provided not only the minister who came up from
Cape Cod but she, with Doris, discussed where to have the
wedding. We had I think a Unitarian minister in a congregational
church, which was the New Old South Church, on the Copley Square.

Library on one side and the famous church, Episcopal church,

on the third side, and then all these commercial establishments
on the other side, on the fourth side. So we foundDoris found
a small chapel called the Children s Chapel. It seats only about
twenty- four people, which was about the number of people that we
would have [chuckles]. We didn t want to have one of these
enormous churches with this long corridor to walk down.

Besides housing Doris, she gave Doris this beautiful piece

of lace, antique lace, which Doris used as a shawl. It was just
beautiful during the wedding. So we had this wedding with all of
our California barbarians and a bunch of the New England people
that we had met; also some people Libby knew. So we had the
place filled, in total, with twenty-four people, you know,
[chuckles]

Blaney Family Hospitality for the Reception and Honeymoon

Maslach: We had the reception, of course, on Louisburg Square in one of

the Blaney houses. In fact, both of the Blaney houses were open.
Beautiful reception. All picked up by the Blaneys. As Libby one
time told me, she made less money as a draftsman full-time,
forty-four hours a week at MIT than she paid the man who came to
light the gas light outside of her house on Louisburg Square. Of
course, the Blaney family had been there for a century. A couple
of centuries, I should say. They were very well known to
everybody.

The man who had a horse and buggy on Louisburg Square used
to park it right in front of the Blaney house, which they gave
him the permission to do so. He was very happy because it was a
prime location, right there with the lantern and so on. He
eventually became the owner of and operator of the biggest car
rental and livery, limousine service in Boston. When he heard
that Libby was going to be the maid of honor, he put on his
uniform and he drove the limousine [chuckles] with Libby and
 172

Doris to the church. So it was just amazing what we had at the

church.

The reception, of course, was great. One of the pictures I

showed you of the wedding partyin the background was all this
beautiful Steuben glassware- -an antique, matched set. One of my
barbarians, Art Hughes, tossed a bag of confetti up onto this
mantelpiece and hit one of these things and was rocking it. It
could have fallen and smashed. Doris just about fainted
[laughs] .

At that point, when the reception was over, the wedding

party took off. It consisted of Captain George and his wife
Millie, who were our servants, two of the many servants the
Blaneys had. They were driving the car, during wartime, down to
Weston, and we spent our honeymoon for a week down in this
beautiful Blaney house, historic house on Weston Road. So we had
two servants tending to us. The house was fabulous. We would be
in this dining room. Every morning there would be a fire in the
fireplace. Breakfast was fantastic, of course.

Millde was a great cook. And Captain George was a seaman.

He ran the boats up at Bar Harbor, and they actually lived up in
Maine. But Libby had brought them down for the express purpose
of having them take care of us down at Weston [chuckles].

Swent : How wonderful!

Maslach: So that was in March. We kept seeing the Blaneys all the time,
inviting us to such things as Thanksgiving dinner, which is very
big in New England. We would eat in the Blaney house, and Dwight
Blaney would be the head of the table, and you d have maybe ten,
twelve people. Dwight Blaney just loved to take women like you
and harass them until they cried. He really was a vicious man in
that respect. He must have hated women in general. He was quite
a character. As I said, a well-known artist and so on.

He and I got along very well because he kind of gave me a

nasty little remark the first time we met, about ten minutes
after we had met, I just gave it back, the same kind of remark.
In other words, I didn t stand for his nastiness, and he knew it,
and so when I returned the "compliment" to him, we were the best
of friends. From then on, he and I--I couldn t do anything
wrong. I would always leave little gifts for him. They invited
us. We would always bring over something that he drank. He was
an alcoholic of a world class. So he loved certain kinds of
Scotch which you could get at S. S. Pierce, the gourmet food
store.
 173

But I would go to little liquor stores up in, say, the north

of Boston, which was the Italian section, around North Station.
And you would go in these liquor stores and look around, and you
could find vermouth, which he liked, Rossi vermouth. Martini and
Rossi. And I would get that and stash it away, and then I would
get pinch-bottle Scotch, which he liked. He had a table right
near the entrance to the house, one of the houses, and he kept
his hat there. Never, never really went out, at his age. But 1
would always leave a note with a bottle there or something
[chuckles]. I would have books that I had seen which I knew
would intrigue him, and so on. But he and I got along very, very
well.

Swent : How did he treat Doris?

Maslach: Doris he treated well because, I think, in part of his friendship

with me, but she did not sit next to him [chuckles]. She would
sit down the table-- [chuckling] One of the women that they
.

would ask in--she knew how to handle him. She would just brush
him off, you know [laughs]. But he was quite a character. There
was just no question about it.

We were invited to go up to their island, Ironbound, in Bar

Harbor, Maine. Ironbound Island. And we were to be driven up by
one of his relatives. The relative was an executive of the shoe
company which was a major company up in Lynn, that area, near
Boston. And so they met us at the train and took us to their
house. Early next morning, we climbed [in] to their Ford and we
drove all the way up to Bar Harbor, Maine.

But not without a case of Glengarry Scotch, which I picked

up at S. S. Pierce. We had received a letter from Dwight Blaney,
to pick up the case at a certain time, and I went there and they
said, "Oh, yes." Here was this case wrapped in newspaper,
beautifully tied with heavy string and a handle, because a case
of Scotch is pretty heavy. And so I took this thing up. I
didn t even have to sign anything. Just went out, you know. So
I took this with us, of course.

We got to Bar Harbor, and Captain George was there with this
boat, and they took us over to the island. I made a kind of a
boo-boo there, but nothing happened. In Maine, liquor is sold
only in state-owned shops, and so here I was with a case of
Scotch whichpeople couldn t tell it was Scotch because it was
wrapped, but I had other bottles which were out in the open
[laughs], but no one said anything, and I don t know how they
police this up there anyway.
 174

So we got over to the island, and there was a long walkway

from the harbor up to where the main house is. A hundred and
fifty feet up in elevation. And enormous, beautiful house. Big
veranda around it, and it could sleep a dozen guests. Big
kitchen and so on. He had a studio, artist s studio, off to the
side.

Captain George stopped at a spot on the road. We were

walking, and he stopped and he said, "You can walk from here
right through the grass." There s a big lawn, and there, up on
the veranda, was Dwight and Libby and so on. So I said, "Just a
minute." And I went to this little Ford truck that he had, and 1
picked up the case of Scotch and put it on my shoulder, and I
went--Doris and these other people, the relatives, across the
grass where the people were sitting. I just came up the steps
and Blaney,
"Mr. here you are." [chuckles] And I put down the
case of Scotch at his feet.

And his eyes just lit up, and he shook my hand, and he said,
with me." And he ignored everybody else. And we went into
"Come

his bedroom, which was on the first floor of this two-story

building, and he closed the door, and he and I were in there for
about half an hour, drinking warm Scotch with warm mineral water,
[laughs] It was the worstno ice cubes! This was the way he
drank it. I suffered through that. But they had put a sailboat
in for Doris and me to sail. And we went fishing, and we went on
a clam bake. We went picking wild raspberries on Slave Island
and so on. The clam bake you couldn t believe. Lobsters they
had right there, you know? And potatoes, corn on the cob, and
beer, Schlitz beer. I remember that photograph of one of the
guys drinking the beer and eating the lobster [chuckles].

So we had a week of just an amazing New England vacation,

with all of these servants. We had a cook who was Irish and was
convinced that I had dropped the off my name, which is
"ski"

something that was done, you know, so she would always call me
Mr. Maslachski. [laughter]

First we lived on Joy Street, which is on Beacon Hill, right

behind the Joy Street Playhouse, in one of the oldest houses in
Boston, a wooden house which was quite cold in the wintertime.
Had fireplaces and so on. The heat was on for an hour or so in
the morning, then a couple of hours in the evening. Just down
the street was the Joy Street police station, and go in the other
direction a couple of blocks, why, there was the statehouse.

Joy Street, as you might imagine, was the prostitution

section of old Boston. Joy Street provided joy. Right down the
end of the street, around the corner, was the burlesque house,
 175

the Old Howard, which was a famous burlesque house in Boston.

One of the famous women that was there for many, many years:
Tessie the Tassle Tosser. She had more tassles whirling in the
air than you can believe.

So this is where we lived. On every weekend- -Fridays,

Saturdays, Sundays they would have a play in the old Joy Street
Playhouse, and we of course would always hear the people during
intermission because they had a beautiful little courtyard that
they could walk into. We were probably trying to sleep. Our
bedroom was on that courtyard. But they had one of these old
thrillers with the villain and the heroine and the hero, and
there was a pistol shot which was always near the end of the play
[chuckles]. We would always hear that pistol shot.

We lived there for about a year. The rats were so bad-

Boston is filled with rats. We moved ^to an apartment on Hereford
Street, which is much closer for me to walk to MIT. We lived
there for the last couple of years. It was the place where we
met a whole new group of people. Downstairs was living Tuddy and
Roy McKie. He became a famous commercial artist. "Never

underestimate the power of a woman." He had these cartoon-type

ads that he did for The New Yorker and all kinds of other he
later was with N. W. Ayer, big commercial advertisement agency in
Philadelphia.

They were just some out-of-school-type people, you know?

They had a wonderful child, and they later had a second child.
Doris and Tuddy were pregnant at the same time. The second one
for Tuddy, the first one for Doris. That was Christina, who
later became a professor here at Berkeley. But they were just a
wonderful young couple.

Sightseeing by Bicycle around Boston

Maslach: Doris and I by this time had bought bikes, and we were biking all
over New England. You had to bike to get to Lexington and
Concord and those areas, and so we would go up there to Hartwell
Farm, a famous restaurant where the farm was where Paul Revere
was captured by the British and later that night escaped when he
made his famous ride to Concord. He never got to Concord. The
other man got to Concord. Paul Revere got to the important
place, which was Lexington, where he advised the important people
at the inn what was happening. Concord, of course, is where the
battle started.
 176

We would walk and bike down the road from Concord to

Lexington, which was my favorite walking area because in those
days there would just be little wooden plaques. There was one
place there was a big wood fence, and inscribed in the bar of
wood was "Beyond this bar lie twelve British dead. Two officers
and ten" you know. And "casualties of the Battle the knoll
of"

that was there. And then you climb up on the knoll and you find
more evidence. So you just walked down this wonderful museum,
all the way to Lexington.

Today it s just an enormous long park, and it has lost all

of its character because everything is sort of updated for the
masses of tourists. Lots of parking lots and things. They
rebuilt the burned-down farmhouse, which was a great restaurant
serving "chicken in all its varieties." Hartwell Farm. Big
jars of jam, home-made and so on. We would go up there for
Sunday for lunch. It was fabulous.

Of course, you would go to the pond [Walden Pond], you know,

and see where [Henry David] Thoreau used to stay. You would also
go to the bridge, always go to the bridge, to the houses nearby
and look at them. Also you could take the bike to North Station,
show them your ticket, put the bike in the baggage car. Then,
when you got off at Salem you just went and got your bike. So
you would bike around Salem. The house with all the--

Swent : Gables?

Maslach: Gables. You know, seven gables. And the fabulous museum, the
Peabody Museum, which is there. All great. And then all the
historical homes that were there, the museums. And then you
could bike from Salem down to Marblehead. Then you would have
lunch at Marblehead.

##

Swent: So you were biking down to Salem and Marblehead.

Maslach: We had all kinds of favorite places that we would bike to. Those
were obvious places, close in to Boston. We would go and visit
the Meyers. I think by this time- -no, I ll take that back. We
later visited them, but not with bicycles. They were in a town
called Nahant . But we also would go to Rockport which is a
,

popular tourist area now, and Gloucester. The train would go all
the way to Gloucester, and then you would get off with your bike
and you would go through Gloucester and you would maybe visit
Bear Neck on Gloucester and the artist colony, and then you would
go around Cape Ann and end up at Rockport, have lunch there and
explore around that old town, and then bike down through
 177

Annisquam to Gloucester, where you caught the train again, go

back home .

We even did this overnight by going on Saturday afternoon

and visiting and staying in Gloucester, having a shore dinner,
which you, of course, knowlobster and everything else.

Swent : You re making me hungry [chuckles].

Maslach: But I remember when we went one time. We got out of the bed and
breakfast place where we were staying, and we went to a diner,
which was down in the center of town, Sunday morning, early. And
we walked into this diner, in which all the windows were steamed
up. You know, cold air outside. And when we walked in, we were
met by, oh, easily fifty or more Portuguese fishermen, who were
dressed up in their Sunday finery, which were these incredible
plaid suits, very small pattern, very "flashy. And they wore
derby hats, and they were brown derbies. They were, you know,
the best they were just amazing, when you walked in.

And when we walked in and they saw Doris, why four of them
jumped out of one of the booths and we sat down and had our
breakfast. And all around us, standing up and sitting down, of
course, were all these men, talking in Portuguese. It was quite
a scene. So we saw a part of Gloucester that we never expected
[chuckles] to see. But we would also stay up there in Rockport
because it was so scenic.

And then for a vacation one time we took the bikes on the
train down to Cape Cod, and we biked around Cape Cod. Started at
Hyannis, of course, and then went all the way out to Provincetown
and all the way back down on the other side to Barnstable and all
those other towns, and finally back to Boston.

Rather interesting: There was a hurricane coming up the

coast from the Caribbean, and it was down below New York, but it
was heading up Cape Cod way. So we were sitting there in
Hyannis, and I said, "Why don t we just go home? Because the
hurricane will hit near by. It might not hit here, but it will
hit somewhere. It will be heavy rains, so it will be a mess."
So we got the last train out of Hyannis that Sunday evening with
our bikes and got home just as it started to rain. And slept
right through the hurricane, which hit Cape Cod, incidentally,
and did major damage. I think that was 44.

The next morning, we got up and we--"Hey, what a beautiful

day." And it was. Clear as crystal and--so we biked up to
Concord. And then we saw people in front of stores, one store,
dumping ice cream, which was all liquid. We said, "What s going
 178

on?" Well, there was no power on. We didn t know. We were

biking [chuckles]. And so the power was off, and so we couldn t
eat at Hartwell Farm or any other place, and we had to bike
somewhere down- -we found some place where we could buy some food,
and we made some sandwiches [chuckles]. But that was the great
hurricane in 44.

The Manhattan Project and Declassifying the Rad Lab, August 1945

Maslach: The next thing I wanted to kind of tell you was when we finally
learned that the atomic bomb was dropped--! should expand upon
that because the Manhattan Project pulled about fifty to a
hundred people out of the Radiation Laboratory. These were
physicists, all of whom had knowledge of nuclear, atomic physics.
Ken Bainbridge, for example, who put the last bomb--the last man
to put the bomb together and set up the trigger and then walk off
the tower there at Los Alamos--was a guy that I used to work
with, talk to. In fact, he helped me in designing the first
radar antenna [chuckles]. So, you know, these are famous
figures .

Willie Higginbottom. All of a sudden, he disappeared. His

address was a post office box, Santa Fe All of these people,
.

you know. We figured out what was going on because we knew their
specialties. We knew about the atomic bomb program second-hand.
But finally, when the atomic bomb was dropped, that signalled the
end, and we had a big convocation called by Lee and others. It
was in the big courtyard of MIT, in front of the big dome that
faces the river. Here you had over five thousand people sitting
on the grass, listening to Lee and a couple of speakers.

Swent : This is DuBridge.

Maslach: This is Lee DuBridge. So it was a very solemn day. We all were
just sitting there--

Swent : How soon after was this?

Maslach: Well, [when] the war was over, we disbanded.

Swent : That was August of 45.

Maslach: Yes. And we just went, and it was over. It was amazing, just
how fast it was demobilized. A lot of people were anxious to get
back to their universities and university work. And there were a
lot of people who were, you know, kind of wondering what the hell
 179

they were going to do or were anxious to get started interviewing

[chuckles] and so on. A lot of people just wanted to get home.
A lot of people wanted to get moving on their research and so on.
So everybody wanted to leave.

I was asked to stay at MIT at the laboratory there, which

went into a new name. I was asked to take a Ph.D. there, but 1
decided that that was not for me. One of the funniest moments
was when we demobilized the laboratory. All of us had file
cabinets full cf secret, classified reports. And this was just
too much and too fast. So the librarian who was in charge of all
of this and had all of the records just made a decision, which
was a wonderful decision, and that was [chuckles] he set up big
boxes in the hallways in these buildings, and you were on an
honor system to take your classified material and dump them into
these big boxes. You would wrap them up with a string or
something and have a list of these reports, and you would sign
off, and you would just dump them.

Well, of course, anybody who looked at these boxes look at

this report! All of a sudden, there would be all these reports
which were being moved from hand to hand. They were kind of
historical reports. A lot of it should be declassified and so
on. But that s the way they handled the declassif ication of the
laboratory [chuckles]. We just dumped everything [chuckles] that
we had. It was an honor system approach to the whole thing.

It was a kind of a solemn ceremony because we were at, on

the one hand, the end of the war; but on the other hand, we had
all of these memories and all of these things that happened. Of
course, the laboratory had gotten into being right on the front
lines. They had--as you could see, they had a lab substation in
Great Britain. They had one later in France, in Paris.

And friends of ours were over there and almost killed

because they were dressed in khaki uniforms, just chinos and
shirt. Had no identification. And one of my friends, Charlie
West, was almost killed by an American squad as a spy because in
the Battle of the Bulge, the Germans put on American uniforms and
infiltrated the lines, and this was a real problem. So all of a
sudden, this guy: "Who is he?" He spoke perfect English and so
on, but they kept him in jail. And really, he was -up to be
killed. So this was a scary time.

Ernie Martinelli, who I mentioned earlier, had gone over to

Great Britain and was at the lab there, and during a bombing
raid, he went to the air raid shelter which, of course, was the
subway, and there was a person who was also in the laboratory,
 180

Betty, and they later got married [chuckles). As we said, they

said they met :n an air raid shelter [chuckles] in London.

So all kinds of different things were happening. As I said,

on the one hand I had this fantastic life with New England
people the Blaneys especially, but with also the people down at
T Wharf, the Meyers. Doris was getting a master s degree in
psychology. She had offered her services but found out that they
would pay her less to work in a laboratory as a mathematician--
that s what she had a degree in--and you would think they wanted
her they would pay her less than she was making when she was a
saleslady in one of the stores in San Francisco. So she said
what she would need in terms of moving and the times were very
bad, very early in the morning, and to make dinner and so on, it
was just- -we would spend more money than she would be making. So
she went and took a degree in child development, and she has
quite a story to tell, of course.

Swent : Where did she do that?

Maslach: Well, there s a clinic in which she did most of the hands-on
work, but Boston University was the university where she got the
degree .

People other people, for example, the Culiners that we

still see often. We met in 1943 in Boston. He s a doctor.
Helen was quite pregnant at the time we met her. She and her
husband would be walking around Boston. But she was taking a
degree in psychology, too. So that s how we met.

I, of course, was asked to go to work by a man by the name

of Ray Carman, head of Group Sixty-Four. He and Marcel Droz, a
Spanish man, later became director and associate director of
General Precision Laboratory. This was set up in--Ah, 1 have got
a block on the name. The county just north of New York City.
Very expensive, ritzy county. Westchester.

But anyway, I think this is a good time to break because I

want to do something here, and that is to get our schedule set
and get the--

Swent: I just have one more question.

Maslach: Okay.

Swent: The group that you were with were trainers at MIT.

Maslach: That was Group 64.

 181

Swent :
Right .

Maslach: In several of those photographs, if you ll notice

Swent: Yes, I looked at those. You were always the one in the middle
because you were the tallest, [chuckles]

Maslach: Lee Haworth and Ibecause the division officeshe was my boss,
ostensibly. I was kind of a sub-group, and so just to make it
easy for the book and the photography, why, they had me with
trainers because I did a lot of work with trainers, but they also
had me with other groups where I did a lot of work.

Swent: I see. You were with the receiver group.

Maslach: Yes, yes. Indicators, yes, yes.

Swent: I see.

Maslach: So I put Doris on the train to get her to San Francisco, where
Christina was born.

Swent: I see. Okay. All right. Well, I guess shall we stop then?

Maslach: Yes, why don t we stop--

Duayne Gordon and George Maslach, University of California students in
electrical and mechanical engineering, respectively, worked all summer
of 1941 on the NBC Building, then returned to their studies.

Photo by L. Romaine.
Doris and George Maslach, New Old South Church Children s Chapel,
Boston, Massachusetts, March 12, 1943.
Faculty Club Hearts Table. From the left: Professors Dick Powell and Ed
Orleman of the chemistry department, Art Hudson from engineering, George
Maslach, and Charles Tobias (rear view) from chemical engineering.
Doris with Jamie, Steven, and Christina at Berkeley Friends meeting
picnic, circa 1957.
George Maslach s sister Sophie; his mother, Anna; his wife, Doris; and
father, Michael Maslach, 1957.
U.S. Department of Commerce Technical Advisory Board, Washington, D.C.,
circa 1965. George Maslach third from the left.

Photo courtesy National Bureau of Standards.

Professor of Aeronautical
Engineering, George Maslach, in U.C,
Berkeley wind tunnel.

With graduate student, Gene Moulic,

1965.

Photos courtesy Look Magazine.

Academic Board of Advisors meetings: Professor George J. Maslach, Dean,
College of Engineering, University of California; Rear Admiral D.L.
Kauffman, Superintendent, U.S. Naval Academy; and Dr. H.E. Longenecker,
President, Tulane University, 1967.

Photo by F.G. Travis, PH2.

 182

IV BUILDING UP A LABORATORY FOR GENERAL PRECISION LABORATORIES

[Interview 5: October 20, 1998] ////

Converting the Manville Estate into a Laboratory

Maslach: This was the most profound period of the war. We had gone
through the ending of the war with Germany and, of course, we
knew that the war with Japan would end soon. The atomic bombs
had been dropped. We had been told that we were free to go ahead
and do whatever- -move ahead on the next step of our career.

There was an enormous ceremony in the main courtyard of MIT,

in the region between the dome and the river. It s hard to
believe, but they had about ten thousand people sitting on the
grass there, with a podium. There were over five thousand staff
members and about five thousand technicians. Lee DuBridge and
others spoke, and that was the end of the Radiation Laboratory.
Period. We were free to do what we would want to do.

Doris and I had already planned our life to a great extent.

She was pregnant, and shortly thereafter she left by train to
California, where Christina was delivered at the UC Medical
Center in San Francisco. I had a free ticket back to California
because that s where I was originally recruited, and under the
terms of the contract they returned you to where you were
recruited .

So I went out to San Francisco and looked at San Francisco.

You must remember I was born and raised there. Immediately after
the war, you could not see the growth potential that was going to
occur. In fact, the whole Bay Area was dull compared to Boston,
MIT, and the potential for a job down in New York.

So I came back to New York and took a job with General

Precision Laboratories, a subsidiary of General Precision
Equipment, which is best known for turning out practically one
hundred percent of all motion picture theater equipment:
 183

projectors, arc lamps, sound systems, everything that s needed to

put on a motion picture show of 35-millimeter film. I was one of
the first senior people that they appointed, but they also
appointed, oh, about twenty people from MIT. Ray Carman, who was
the head of the trainer group at MIT and who had me doing quite a
bit of work, was the director of the laboratory, and Marcel Droz
was the associate director. And I knew both of them very well.

So the next step was to build up a new laboratory. We went

touring around in an automobile, around New York City, over in
[New] Jersey and Long Island, looking at large mansions that
were, of course, empty. We spotted a couple down in Long Island
that looked reasonable. One of them later was taken over by
another company. But the senior vice president of the
corporation ruled out Long Island because of the traffic and
transportation conditions of being on that island. Very wise
move on his part. He sort of pointed us in the direction of the
mainland, directly north of New York City.

And so we eventually ended up in Pleasantville, New York,

which is usually best known as the home of the Reader s Digest.
But practically all they had there is a big post office
operation. Everything else is located elsewhere. But we bought
the mansion of Hiram Manville of Manville asbestos products fame
and uncle of Tommy Manville, who was best known for his marital
affairs.

Seventy acres, of which thirty-five acres were lawn and

housing and buildings and so on, including, of course, the main
building. The problem was to convert the main building into a
research laboratory, which in itself was not too difficult. I
was asked to supervise all the construction relationships with
the contractors. And so we did the main building pretty quickly,
largely a problem of increasing electrical power.

But it was really odd to be in a big mansion like that

because you walk in the main entrance, and you re in a Gothic-
cathedral type room, soaring thirty feet, with beautiful
stonework and so on.

Swent: Quite a contrast from MIT!

Maslach: Yes. It was not spartan. They had a large stable about, oh, a
hundred and fifty yards away from the main building, and the
architects were able to design an apartment house for people
there because living quarters in Pleasantville, Chappaqua, and
other places near by were not that plentiful. So I worked with
the architects and the builders there, and we ended up with
fourteen apartments. I wish we could have saved and used some of
 ISA

the old horse stalls because the wood was absolutely fabulous,
varnished, and the center oak, center part of the stables, just
absolutely modern and also beautiful. You could live there,
really. Those horses had a wonderful spot. So anyway, we built
up that .

A Startup Problem, Similar to that at MIT

Swent : How did this relate to anything you had done at MIT?

Maslach: It was a startup problem. Everybody was doing anything that was
necessary to get moving. And in many respects it was like MIT.
We were starting from scratch, and we need to do this, we need to
do that, and you just did it. You were ordering different
materials and items, and you just--whatever was necessary, you
did it. And it was amazing. Everybody chipped in and did their
work.

Anyway, this laboratory developed very rapidly. We had a

number of contracts from the armed forces and other agencies in
the federal government. Some of the people just continued doing
what they were doing and had been doing at MIT because there was
a lot of radar development in our contracts. I, in fact, turned
out a trainer, totally mechanical.

Swent: A trainer for what?

Maslach: Well, basically, you simulated a flight of aircraft coming in

from a direction, and you wanted to be able to move these
airplanes at certain speeds, certain vectors, and you wanted them
to maneuver in certain ways and so on.

Working on the Pioneer Fast Film Developing Unit

Swent: This has nothing to do with movie equipment, then?

Maslach: No, most of the work that we did in the beginning was radar
oriented because this was essentially where most of the people
came and that s what the contracts we were getting. However, it
was a commercial laboratory, and after I finished a major trainer
job and also a major indicator, radar indicator job, I ended up
doing something which was very unique. Television had come in,
and the theaters wanted to be able to run live television,
 185

essentially, into the theater. This gave them all kinds of new
problems for the projectors and getting film and so on.

So I worked on a very fast film developing unit, which

developed, dried, and had in archival form 35-mm film, in which
we had taken photographs off the television tube, and then we
were able in one minute, between the television on the tube and
the film in the projector, have dry film projecting. So there
was a one-minute delay, essentially. And that piece of equipment
was recognized as a major change in photographic work.

And I find it humorous today. I ll have to show you the

articles when the equipment was first produced, and today when
you go into these photo shops which give you one-hour
development, it s practically the same equipment. It s much less
expensive and not as high priced in the sense of materials and so
on, but basically it s the same. I mean, you put the pictures of
the two pieces of equipment next to each other. You could see
the genealogy [chuckles] of that equipment. So it s now being
used, and they re producing it, mass producing it, as a fast-
developing processor.

All of these jobs sort of had this funny history in that

they keep coming back, and you see something--! told you earlier
I can walk in airports and see beacons that I had designed.
Well, now I don t see those any more because they have far better
ones, more modern. But now I walk into a photo shop and I see
the equipment that I designed for General Precision.

It was a good period of time. The amazing thing about

General Precision Laboratory is that we all lived essentially on
this estate. Well, not all, but a large portion of the senior
people lived there, and we walked out of our condo-type
apartments through the vegetable gardens, where we grew our own
veggies, that used to be the vegetable gardens for the big house,
through the formal garden, past the tennis court, past the
swimming pool, into the main building, where we had our offices.
It was just a wonderful [chuckles] environment.

You would go home for lunch, of course, and everybody saw

each other. And in those families there were twelve children in
twelve consecutive months. This was immediately postwar. The
baby boomers were coming. And so we had not only Christina but--
she was born before we got therebut then Jamie was born while
we were there. We had parties constantly. Everybody talked. We
were an enclave, and we were separate from the city. We were
about a mile outside of the Pleasantville town center.
 186

The first election was when [Henry] Wallace was running as a

third-party candidate. And, of course, Norman Thomas was
running. These were on the liberal side. And then you had
[Thomas E.] Dewey and [Harry S] Truman. This was the great
election where Dewey thought he had won, and he had not. We had
one man who gave a stirring speech on why you should vote for
Norman Thomas, not waste your vote on Truman, who would lose. So
all these people went to the polls, 100 percent voting.

Of course, we were a new element in town. So, like, fifty

people all of a sudden voted. It s a heavy Republican area in
New York. So the day after the election [chuckles], we went down
and looked at the results of the town election [chuckles], and
there would be Norman Thomas. Three or four people had voted
[chuckles] for Norman Thomas; a couple had voted for Wallace; and
all these people that voted for Truman. It was practically the
only people on the left side of the balance; all the rest were
Republican. I mean, it was almost 100 percent Republican in that
area. So we were kind of looked at askance, you know, as the new
people .

We were all sort of second generation away from our

families. No one there was close to their families. People came
from New Orleans, California, upper New England, some Midwest.
They did not go back to their families for holidays, so we would
always have big Thanksgiving and Christmas, New Year s type
operations. It s just amazing how much fun we had there. It was
like living in a country club. We had the tennis court to
ourselves, and we ran matches. We had a ladder arrangement. It
was pretty nice living because the thirty acres of lawn were
constantly being mowed, and all these specimen trees and flowers
outside your window [chuckles], so it was really living a plush
life.

Swent : What was it like to be living and working with the same people?

Maslach: Well, we actually got along quite well. The mechanical

engineering group was small. There was a man by the name of
Karelitz who came from MIT. He was famous for work on the Mt .

Palomar telescope. And another fellow by the name of Frank

Dibble, who was my age, who had graduated from MIT. And there
was one or two others; and that was it. So it was small groups.
Again, it was the same type of thing. You had the ability to
kind of pick your projects and work where you wanted to work.
You developed groups that were project oriented, so it followed
the MIT model, but being much smaller. We had eventually about a
hundred scientists there. So it was a lot of fun.
 187

However, I was at the same time being asked by the

University of California to come back here to Berkeley and to
teach or to do research or so on. The primary person who
contacted me was Carl Vogt, a legendary figure in mechanical
engineering, essentially an automotive and internal combustion
engine research man. He had a wonderful sense of humor. But he
was chairman at one point, and I remember he kept sending me
telegrams. I would go down to the national conventions of the
ASME [American Society for Mechanical Engineering], and I would
meet him there and stuff like that. I kept putting him off,

putting him off.

Then I decided that that banker on that train coming down

the Mohawk Trail when I first came to Boston was absolutely
right. I wanted to go back to California [chuckles]. So we came
back in 1949.

Return to San Francisco, 1949

Swent : You were there four years, then.

Maslach: Yes. What we did was to buy a Studebaker, which managed to get
us all the way to California. It had a very small-diameter
clutch. The clutch was a weak part of that design. But we put
the kids in the back seat, built up the back seat with suitcases
and so on, and just drove. You know, we shipped all of our
furniture and so on. We had a wonderful time driving through
Lincoln country and then up to Michigan and Wisconsin area. All
of the high points that you would go across country. We went to
Glacier Park, Yellowstone, and headed up to northern California.
Actually, we came in on Oregon to the coast, and then we came
into California.

This was a major change for us because we were coming back

to family, and we were in our home ground. We stayed in a house
for years, two years, that belonged to Doris s family. It was up
there near the top of Telegraph Hill. Her family--

Swent : In San Francisco.

Maslach: In San Francisco. Her family went back generations to 1854. At

one point, Billie Cuneo, old grandfather I guess, of Doris s,
,

could have bought the entire top of Telegraph Hill. But he had
enough property up there, so they had houses. We got one of
them.
 188

I came over to the East Bay, not directly to Berkeley and UC

Berkeley because I had another rather gaudy offer, a high-priced

company in the East Bay. They were on the verge of quite an
expansion. At least they thought they were.

Swent : Would you name the company?

Maslach: No, I don t think I should name the company because it is a

company that s still in existence.

Swent :
Okay .

Maslach: I m not saying anything bad about the company, really, but it was

basically working in hydraulics, mechanical design. I went to

interview with them, and they were happy to see me and have me
and so on, and they made me an offer. Within one week, a major
contract which they had expected to get from the federal
government fell through, so [chuckles] last hired-first fired,
essentially. I never drew a paycheck with them. But 1 was let
go immediately.
 189

RESEARCH ENGINEER AT UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY,

1949

A Remarkable Change from New York

Maslach: I drove from there to UC Berkeley and dropped in to see Carl Vogt
[chuckles]. He was no longer chairman. R. G. Folsom was the
chairman. He was a fluid mechanics, heat transfer man, mainly
fluid mechanics. He was a big fellow. He was an Ail-American
football player at Caltech, Ail-American for their level of
football. He was a lineman. He was just a big, rugged guy.

He later went on from Berkeley to become research director

at University of Michigan and then later president of Rensselaer
Polytechnic Institute in upstate New York. He had quite a good
career. He was a close associate of "Mike" [Professor Morrough]
O Brien because they both were essentially in the same field,
although Mike was in civil engineering, while Folsom was in
mechanical engineering.

So I got my first glimpse of UC Berkeley and what might be

possible as a new career. I must say it was something that I
never really expected. While they were talking teaching, they
also had a lot of work in research, so I was introduced to Enos
Kane, who later became one of the vice presidents of Standard Oil
and who did his Ph.D. thesis in the low-density facility, using
the wind tunnel to measure forces on spheres. That would be the
spheres traveling in the upper atmosphere, thirty to fifty miles
up .

So this was 1949 when the equipment was being built, 1950.
You know, doing research and finishing equipment, building new
instrumentation and so on. It was just a remarkable change
because I took the job, even though it was about a 30 percent cut
in pay from New York, but I figured that the cost of living here
would be less at that time. We had a break on our living
facilities, so I went ahead.
 190

Swent : Would you care to say how much you were paid?

Maslach: It was about seven hundred dollars a month, six hundred, seven
hundred a month.

Swent: What sort of benefits were there then?

Maslach: Well, you of course had the pension plan right from the very
beginning. And you had Kaiser Permanente or other health
services. You did not have dental, but you had Kaiser. I ve
been a member of Kaiser since 1950! I also took the PERS, which
is the Public Employees Retirement System statewide, because the
Regents retirement system did not have a good reputation. It
had almost gone bankrupt a few years earlier. It was saved by
the Regents who put money into it, money which was available to
them, not from the budget.

So anyway, Istarted in doing research on the low-density or

upper-atmosphere research project. It was located in College
Avenue Pool, which is where the architecture, city regional
planning, and landscape architecture building is now, Wurster
Hall. The pool was the last surviving bit of the Phoebe Apperson
Hearst Gymnasium for Women. If you look at the old pictures, the
old campus, this was a wooden Gothic structure, very tall,
beautiful, wooden architecture.

One of the things, of course, in it was a swimming pool.

One pool was left there, and the engineering department was using
it as a small field station because we had a reservoir of water.
Other pools nearby were constructed and used for wave research,
ocean, beach erosion research and so on. And the development of
landing craft during the war.

I had worked there as a student, and this was the original

building still there. I walked back in 1950, seven years later.
So it was like going back home in certain respects. The towing
tank was there which I had worked on. The low-density wind
tunnel was right next door and had been designed under the
supervision of Enos Kane and with Don Horning as the engineer in
the construction.

The First Research Contract, Experimenting on a Pitot Tube

Maslach: So I was asked to head up a $20,000-a-year research program from

NACA. Not NASA, but this was the forerunner of NASA, National
 191

Aeronautics. This was before "Space" became an initial in the

name of NASA.

Swent: What did "C" stand for?

Maslach: I ll have to think about it.

Swent: Well, we can find out.

Maslach: National Aeronautics something Agency, whatever it--

Anyway, the project was to determine what the readings were

for what is called a pitot tube, which measures impact pressure
as you re flying through the air. They re used on aircraft. If
you know the static pressure on the aircraft, on the body, why,
you can tell what your speed is. These two pressures will give
you an indication of speed. Of course, what we discovered is
that after you get high enough up in the atmosphere, the pitot
tube doesn t work. We were able to demonstrate this in that
contract and in other future contracts. It s a function of
Reynold s number, basically, and that is a complicated, non-
dimensional combination of several terms.

That was sort of our breakthrough, 1951, one of our first

papers that came out that got a lot of publicity. Enos Kane s
thesis on sphere drag was also a big breakthrough back in 1950.
I should mention that his project was one of the larger projects

sponsored by the ONR [Office of Naval Research] The tunnels .

that were the big bulk of money came from the navy, the Office of
Naval Research, ONR.

ONR had a very unique condition in which they would fund

research over a period of years, something that they gained
immediately after World War II, and they were the first agency to
be able to carry out research like that. Separate, of course,
from the Atomic Energy [Commission] which was a power unto
,

itself.

So we had NACA and ONR money, and then we had later money
from the Air Force, the equivalent of the ONR in the Air Force,
which came later. We had a budget in 1950--of about, oh,
$80,000 a year, which was big. And it went up from there.

Signatory on the First Basic Federal Research Contract

Swent : And it was entirely federal?

 192

Maslach: All federal money. One of the unique things of humor that I
found was that a couple of years later the University of
California was singled out by the federal government as an
organization to help hammer out a basic contract that could be
used between universities and the federal government, any agency
within the federal government. This was the basic ONR contract
that was developed. I was on an ad hoc committee of people here
in the university, and when they finally finished developing that
contract (which didn t take long}, they kind of looked around for
people to sign the documents. Here at thirty years old, thirty-
one maybe [chuckles], fairly new to the campus, I was a
representative of the largest on-campus research project. And so
I signed.

Even to this day, older people back in Washington, D.C.,

remember this and remember me. All of the rest of the
signatories on that contract are dead". I m the only one still

living [chuckles]. And that was because I was so young!

Unusual. But there was no real big research activity on the
campus except for the Radiation Laboratory which, of course, at
that time was off -campus. So I was a signatory to that first
basic contract that was developed back there.

Anyway, after starting--

II

Maslach: Well, getting back to my first involvement, before we get into

the larger picture, the first month 1 was heading up that NACA
program, which was about $20,000. Then, about a month later, a
contract from the Air Force came in for development of what we
called flow visualization processes. This was in addition to the
ONR contract. So I was asked to head up that project, and I was
given a raise in salary.

Heading Up the Contract with the Office of Naval Research

Maslach: About three months after I came here, Enos Kane had finished his
Ph.D., and he was leaving. He had been heading up the ONR
contact, so I was given the financial control of the ONR
contract. I was essentially running the laboratory, in three
months. And my pay was back to what I was getting back in New
York City [chuckles]. It was really quite a change.

Swent : Were you doing any teaching as well?

 193

Maslach: No, the teaching came later. I want to identify the key people
who worked on that contract because many of them are still
around. Enos Kane, of course, left, but he was one of the
godfathers of the original activity. Dick Folsom died last year,
unfortunately, living up in Napa Valley.

Sam Schaff, Key Theoretician

Maslach: And Sam Schaff, professor emeritus of mechanical engineering, was

essentially the key research person in the sense of theoretical
activity. I was sort of the mechanical engineer doing

experimental-type work and developing experimental equipment,

like a balance, which was very, very sensitive for measuring
forces. Sam of course was the theoretician. He was well known
here for years, teaching a graduate course in engineering
mathematics, analytical mathematics. So these were the key
people running the operation there.

After that we had people who have made a name for themselves
since, and that would include Frank Hurlbut, mechanical
engineering, retired; Rick Sherman, Frederick Sherman, also
mechanical engineering, retired; and they had students who took
their Ph.D. on that program and then stayed on. Rather rare at
the University of California to hire people who got their own
Ph.D. here.

Roxanne Anderson, Secretary and Olympic Champion

Maslach: But we had a wonderful operation there. The characters there

were wonderful. My secretary at the beginning, Roxanne Anderson.
She was a full-blooded Chippewa Indian who took a bronze medal in
the 1936 Olympics held in Germany. She was voted by the American
Olympic team (men, of course) as the most attractive female
athlete. And she was. She was about five foot six, and she had
this wonderful long black hair which she roped around on the top
of her head. They were essentially long pigtails [chuckles].
She had a wonderful face. She had that complexion which you
could tell that there was some color there, but you didn t know
what. She sort of was the mother hen for the group. All these
students and so on.

I always remember I challenged her to a race, sort of

impromptu. 1 was coming one direction; she was coming another
 19A

direction to the lab, and I started running. She just pulled up

her skirts and beat me so badly it was ridiculous. She could
really run! The bronze medal was in the 100-meter low hurdles.
And so she was an athlete! She went on for years here in the Bay
Area, very active in the athletic, amateur athletic programs.
She coached and recruited and so on. But she didn t have a
permanent job coaching, but she really identified people. She
was a wonderful, wonderful person.

The secretaries of any organization, of course, are very,

very important. Rarely do people credit them with how much they
contribute in non-traditional ways. They may have a technique of
running things but not running things, you know. You always want
to be on the right side of the secretaries of any organization.
We had a series of young women, older women, who have just left
their mark on all of that activity.

The research activity was moving very well. I had several

papers out and did many reports within the operation. I had to
make quarterly reports on every project, so I was getting into a
lot of bureaucratic kind of activity and much less mechanical
engineering and much less research.

Swent : How did you feel about this?

Maslach: Well, I had an offer from a company outside who knew me, and I
almost took it. I came very close to taking it. I looked at it

very carefully. But at that point this was 1950, 52 we had

moved over to Berkeley from San Francisco, where we only stayed
for one year, in 1949 to 50. And I had purchased land up on
Panoramic Way, and I built-- 52 we built one rental unit; 54 we
built the second; and 56 we built a house. But I was not
tenured. I was a research engineer, and that has no potential
for an academic appointment. I did not have an advanced degree,
so I thought that in many respects I was sort of an oddball
within the university environment, and I was much more suited for
the commercial-industrial activity.

I don t know who talked me into staying. Clyne Garland, a

professor who was chairman of one of the divisions of Mechanical
Engineering, was probably as instrumental as anybody in talking
me into teaching. Mechanical Engineering was not a single
department at that point. It was really four separate units.
One was heat transfer, fluid mechanics. One was engineering
design. One was applied mechanics. There was a fourth one,
which was just called mechanical engineering.

The thing that was a problem was that we had a lot of older
people in some of the units and then in other units, say, heat
 195

transfer and fluid mechanics there were quite a few young people.
And also in engineering design. So we had sort of the young
Turks and the old guard type of an arrangement. Throughout the
entire college, there were changes going on. Major, major
changes. Changes in attitude, perception. You know, what the
field of engineering was going to develop into and so on.

Lecturer for Undergraduate Classes, 1952-1954

Swent : What were these changes? Could you be specific?

Maslach: Well, the first thing and the most obvious is that we had moved
into graduate engineering instruction, with its component of
research, whereas before overwhelmingly it was a bachelor s
degree program. We had a small master s degree program and
practically a non-existent doctoral program. Just to give you
kind of perspective, in 1963, when I became dean, the number of
Ph.D.s granted in engineering was around seven.

Swent : Per year.

Maslach: Pretty small. We re now up around two hundred. But in the

master s degree program in, oh, 1952 it probably was maybe a
hundred, and today it s five hundred. So this change was going
on, and it was not erupting in any formal manner. We did not
have any message from God as to what we should be doing.
Everybody was kind of moving New people were coming out of
institutions back East, and Stanford and other places. And they
all wanted to continue their research activities as well as
teach.

So I was asked to teach by Clyne Garland. I remember

meeting with him one evening. He said, "Well, why don t you just
start teaching on the bottom and just go up the ladder?" Just
teach a course in freshman, sophomore, junior year and so on.
Actually, that didn t work out quite that way. The first course
that I taught was a graduate seminar on vacuum systems design. 1
put out these wonderful notes and eventually put them into a
book.

So I taught a graduate course first. That was really the

easiest thing to teach when you re first teaching. In a sense,
you re teaching what you re doing every day, you know, to people
who were very knowledgeable. Teaching a freshman course is very,
very difficult. You don t know how much time and effort goes
into teaching freshman courses. Very, very difficult.
 196

So after the graduate work, I started teaching at the very

beginning, freshman year graphics, and I moved into dynamics and
statics. And I went on to heat transfer, fluid mechanics, and
also mechanical design. So I was just clicking off all these
courses. I was teaching them a couple of times as I went up the
ladder, teaching these various courses.

Swent : How did you feel about the teaching?

Maslach: I enjoy teaching, mainly because I m a bit of a joker. I enjoy

working with students, and I had a very simple way of teaching.

There was a great amount of laughter, and very serious too. For
example, the first lecture of any class, I would be very serious
and tell them that are here, an elite group with high I.Q.,
"we

and I know what mine is; you probably know what yours is. But
I ll tell you right now there are people out in that audience
there with I.Q.s higher than mine."

"Now,why am I teaching, and why aren t they up here

teaching? The point is that I have experience on my side. I
know, I ve learned, I ve had knowledge that I ve learned, I know
where to go to get knowledge to answer questions," and so on.
"And I ll guarantee you that any question you ask me on this

subject I ll be able to answer, either immediately or at the next

lecture. "

Having the Class Design the Tests

Maslach: I had a technique of having the class design the tests. For
example, take the final, which carries the most weight of the
tests. I would, in the last lecture, say, "Okay, let s design
the final." And we would go over the entire course, kind of step
by step: what were we trying to get across, what were we
learning, you know, etc., what were the principles involved? You
take any course. There s a limited number of principles in that
course, and you want to be tested on those principles, so you
want to have a problem that will test you here and one over here
and one like this. Okay, there s the final. You re going to
have a problem in this area, that area, that area, that area,
okay? Then I would go home at night and lay out the problems.
You know, design the problems.

Swent : That s a wonderful idea, I don t think I ve ever heard of

anybody doing that.
 197

Maslach: Well, it s a very simple thing. It s just a summary of what

we re trying to do and what we re going to now test it on. They
all applauded, and had a lot of fun.

was able to be very casual in my lectures.

I I m pretty
good at throwing a piece of chalk, a little piece. If somebody
was talking and interrupted, I would fling a piece of chalk. I
was very good. I could hit anybody in that classroom. And once
I hit one guy on the head, and it bounced off onto the shoulder
of the guy he was talking to. I thought that was pretty good.
Two students in one throw.

Swent : What kind of students did you have?

Maslach: Well, at that time it was strictly male. I shouldn t quite say
that. I remember a woman in a freshman graphics class. She
didn t do very well, and she came to office hours and would talk
to me. She had never had anything less than an A or a B in high
school, and on her first quiz she got a D [chuckles], and so she
was really, you know, thrown for a loss. So I finally got to
talking to her about why was she taking engineering. Well, she
was taking engineering because her boyfriend was an engineer. He
was down in San Diego in an aircraft company. I thought that was
not a good idea. But I didn t say so. But before the semester
ended, her boyfriend dumped her. He found somebody down there,
and that was the end of that romance.

I remember she came to office hours to talk about the final

or something, and I said, "Are you going to stay in engineering?"
She looked at me and said, [laughs)
"NO!" And she ended up in
philosophy. I remember seeing her on the campus a year or so
later. She was so happy to see me and to tell me of her progress
in an entirely different field. She was a good student. Lived
up here in Albany, I think. She was quite a gal.

Swent: What age were the students?

Maslach: I would get people seventeen, eighteen years old and four years--

Swent : This was beyond the time when you were getting the G.I. Bill
people.

Maslach: Oh, yes. See, 52. The big G.I. bulge came 1946 to 50. That
was a real flush. I saw some of it, but I didn t have a lot of
teaching in that area with those kinds of people. I saw them in

graduate work, and there were people that stayed on.

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Fun Teaching Mechanical Engineering Design 106

Maslach: But I had fun teaching all the basic courses of the freshman,

sophomore year, and the junior year. Of course, my best

recollection of teaching, where 1 could really impart more than
the usual, was in mechanical design courses, senior courses. 1
remember teaching what was then called 106, which was a
mechanical engineering design course. I put in all kinds of new

problems. Old professors had just had the same problem every
year. I would really foul things up by having all kinds of new

problems. I d even take problems the wind tunnel--you know, the

design of equipment. "Now, if you guys really want to see
something, go and look at the wind tunnel. You re free to go
over there. And this is what I want to do, and you re going to
design it."

So this brought kind of a graduate activity down into the

junior, senior year. I was very successful with that technique.
I had a lot of people who were very creative and liked to work on
something real, rather than something that s theoretical and
abstract .

Swent : Were there texts already developed, or did you do your own texts?

Maslach: We had texts on everything, but in mechanical design, in the

period that I was teaching, I must say the textbooks were quite
poor. They were old-fashioned. They were prewar textbooks,
basically brought up to date a little. For example, one day I
gave a problem on vibrations. It was a classical way to solve
this problem, using classical techniques. One of the students--
this was in the f ifties--submitted one sheet and the problem was
solved. Usually, the classical technique, you would have several
sheets of paper to solve that one problem. I couldn t believe
it. I looked at it and looked at it. And this kid was so smart
and so forward-looking. Got an A+ on that one, for sure.
He had used a computer. This was early fifties. I was using an
old-type computer on the wind tunnel, but for this kid to get
hold of some computational system and use a computer, I don t
know how he did it. But he did it. And it was perfect.

One of the things I would do--he s a good example--! would

ask people to come to my office hours. I would invite them.
Office hours are the least used resource of teaching at the
university. You would have maybe three or four hours, office
hours, during the week, and you might be lecturing in one course
three hours a week, another course in the laboratory or
something, you know, four or five hours. But nobody comes to the
office hours. And there you re one on one. In a lecture, you
 199

might be thirty or sixty to one, students to faculty. You can t

get a question in a class like that. Even if you divided had so
much question time per hour, you add it up for the whole year, a
couple of office hour meetings would be equivalent of asking
those questions.

I was so irritated frustrated, 1 guess, is the proper word

--that I would at the beginning require people who were getting
Ds and Fs to come to office hours. I would just schedule them.
I said, "Come in and schedule this hour." That worked out quite
well. It s amazing how well we could bring people up with just a
couple of hours of tutoring, essentially.

There were people who, you know, just did not know how to
take examinations. I told you the woman I tutored when I was a
student. She just did not know how to take an exam. I had a
student in one of my classes, I think it was dynamics. Just
shaking. Not even able to write his name. I gave him a special
exam every time, in the office.

Swent: He was just so frightened?

Maslach: Yes. And I worked with him and worked with him. You couldn t
believe how bad these things were. So I learned an awful lot
about teaching. And there s an old cliche which is very, very
true. You really do not know the subject until you teach it.
And that is that you have to do so much research in getting ready
to teach. For example, when I first taught a statics course, the
text was by Lathe Merriam. He had put out two textbooks, which
were very, very popular. I at the beginning of the summer
decided I would do the problems in the book.

There were around a thousand problems in this one text. So

1 started in. Quite easy. I was just moving along. I would do
ten a night or whatever. I even prepared lectures during the
summer and jotted down notes and thoughts of the way I would
approach something. When the fall came and I was to teach, I was
given a desk copy of the book and also an 8 by 11, thin, bound
book, which was an answer book. Every problem in the text was
done in that book. A little piece ofthat much space
[demonstrating] for one problem. You know, very small type,
essentially. So I had done all the problems on my own, and here
was a book with all the problems done! Actually, doing the
problems myself was of course much more important, much more
valuable to the teaching. I went ahead, of course, doing the

teaching.

We used to have six sections of a class like statics or

dynamics, and we would give group tests. Six times thirty in the
 200

class, a hundred and eighty students. We would design a midterm.

Let s say three problems. We would contribute problems and
choose three. And then when we graded the thing, we would sit
around a table like this, and each person would grade one
problem, and I would just pass those around, so there was common
grading.

Al Hale, a Very Good Teacher

Maslach: It was always very interesting to see who came out with the
highest average grade for their class. There would be six people
and six grades. We had a man by the name of Al Hale, who was a
lecturer, who constantly was the top teacher. 1 was pretty much

constantly number two [chuckles]. And then we had these other

people who were not as devoted as Al and I were. I finally just
broke down and said, I want to come and listen to you
"Al,

lecture." [chuckles] I just went to his lectures. He was a

very good lecturer, very good knowledge of the material, better
than mine. And he had one thing and one thing only: in statics
and dynamics you had to make what is called a free-body diagram.

In other words, you want to analyze, say, your chair and the
stresses on the chair because you re sitting on it, okay? And
the stresses on the ground, the legs. Well, you essentially take
that chair and put it in the air, and you replace the forces on
the ground with the forces holding up the chair and so on: your
weight through your center of gravity down on the chair. All of
these things get into the free-body diagram. And once you draw
that diagram, you can then, using basic principles of analysis,
find out what the stress is at this point and so on.

He would require themhe just drilled them and drilled

them, to use free-body diagrams. The key was that it was very
tough. In the midterm, if you did not draw a free-body diagram
for the problem, even if you got the problem right, he would give
you a zero. You had to have the free-body diagram. Of course, I
had never been that tough. But Al Hale knew what was fundamental
and what was most appropriate. His people were very, very good.

So that was my exposure to teaching, by group teaching,

which was very valuable because I was able to compare myself with
five other people, for example. I was a lecturer from 52 to
54.
 201

Associate Professor, 195A

Maslach: Nineteen fifty-four I became--! was appointed associate

professor. Now, that s tenure rank. And I was appointed
associate professor at step two or three, something like that.
There s I think four steps three steps of associate professor,
three. So I was not appointed at step one. That was a very
interesting discussion. I remember I went down one evening and
talked with Clyne Garland, at his request. I had done quite a
bit of research on the side, and my teaching was only part-time.

At one time in there, 1952, 51, 53, I .had three positions;

I was a lecturer, I was a research engineer on the project, and
for a while I was associate director of the Institute of
Engineering Research, which did the bookkeeping and handled all
the services for all research projects in engineering. So I was
head of what was called Service to Industry. We had many
projects for industry, calling in and trying to get help on
certain things.

Well, the university is limited [in] what it can do

privately. We cannot compete, of course, with any private
laboratories that could provide services. Many of the calls, I
would refer them to where they could get the work done. But
there was certain work that we could do and were the only people
that could do it. So we would have all kinds of Service to
Industry projects, where we charged 100 percent overhead.

But to be split three ways was kind of tough.

Associate Director of the Institute of Engineering Research

Swent : Yes, indeed.

Maslach: It was like one quarter, one quarter, one half. So finally, in
54, I was half-time teaching and half-time in research. The
period that I spent in the Institute of Engineering Research, now
called the Office of Research Services--! changed the name when I
became directorwas a wonderful operation. It really was the
way--I think, it was the way universities ought to handle
research projects. The ONR always thought we were the best.
However, we violated at the university one of the accounting
rules on the use of overhead. We should have been funding that
office out of the overhead.
 202

Governor Edmund "Pat" Brown Changed the Charging of Overhead

Maslach: But that had been all taken over out of--the overhead money that
we charged the federal government --was all taken over by Clark
Kerr and then later split fifty-fifty with Governor Pat Brown.
This was one of the first things that Brown did when he became
governor. He did two things which historians of the university
would criticize him for: He raised the tuition; he doubled it.
It was very low. And nobody screamed. Tuition now is a sacred
cause.

But he also took half of the overhead from federal

government grants. Put it into the regular budget of the
university and gave it back to us. It just was moving from one
hand to the other hand. But it was the beginning of the basic
change of a state government funding the university. Major
change, in which now the federal money was even being used.

You can argue both sides. For example, if a research

project comes in here from the ONR, they re going to use
electrical power; they re going to use water. They have space,
they have desks, and they have this and that. Somebody s got to
pay for it. Should the state pay for it? Now, this is a blunt
question that has never really been answered. So overhead was
the way to solve it. And instead of being grants in aid from the
federal government, we went into contracts with the federal
government.

In time, some of the large universitiesprivate ones,

especiallywould charge very high overhead. For example,
overheads of greater than 100 percent. Princeton, I think, is
one of the greatest, and Stanford is close to 100 percent. While
they were up there in the 80 percent bracket, the University of
California was down around the 30 percent bracket.

Swent : What do you mean? That they only took 30 percent of the grants
for overhead?

Maslach: Yes. The overhead formula is you can take so much for this, for
that. You have to be very specific. For services you have to
show where you re spending it. While the private universities
have a far better accounting system than we do at the state
universities and you have to remember that state universities-
University of California, I should say provides for research
time in this whole thing, so that a lot of the private
universities--! 11 use Stanford and MIT as examples-
 203

Maslach: The problem with university overhead has been a continuing

problem, and I m still one of the experts in the nation on this
[chuckles) because, believe it or not, I m one of the dinosaurs
that signed that first contract with the University of California
and the Office of Naval Research, the first basic contract.

The University of California Requires Research, Public Service,

and Teaching

Maslach: But private universities such as MIT and Stanford have many of
their professorships split. In other words, MIT--many, many of
them--50 percent of their time comes from grants and contracts,
and 50 percent of their salary comes from tuition and so on. So
private universities are quite different from public universities
in that regard.

We at the University of California are extraordinarily lucky

to have the system that we have had, in which we are able to do
research, public service, and teaching. In fact, the
constitution requires us to do those things.

Swent : That s the mandate, isn t it?

Maslach: It is. It s mandated. And it s amazing because every professor

in engineering, for example, will schedule a certain fraction of
his time for his teaching, a certain fraction of his time for his
research and so on. I think there s an awful lot of bad-mouthing
about research interfering with teaching. As one of my favorite
professors used to say, you don t sin, you have nothing to
"If

say in the confessional." His point was that the best teaching
was done by the people who are at the forefront of a given
discipline, and I am a firm believer in that. It s a way of
bringing graduate teaching, which you are working one-on-one with
graduate students, down into the undergraduate area.

Henry H. "Packy* Schade, Director of the Institute of Engineering

Research

Maslach: So the Institute of Engineering Research was sort of an

engineering focus for all the contracts and grants and everything
else. The director of it was a legendary professor of naval
architecture, Henry H. Schade. His nickname was "Packy." He was
one of the great naval architects of this century. He was the
 204

head of the naval architectural design program in the navy during

World War II.

He had the rare title of commodore, which is a flag rank

title. In other words, admiral, but he was not an admiral.
Because he had spent all of his time in the design office, so
therefore he never had command of major ships at sea, and that s
a requirement in order to be an admiral. So they resurrected for
him the old, old title, commodore. That was his naval title when
he retired.

He was a legendary person during World War II in the design

of ships for the navy. There were a lot of big, major changes
during that time. Modern ships. You look at Pearl Harbor, with
those old masts on the ships? And you look at the "Missouri" or
something like that or the naval carriers, the aircraft carriers.
What a change! And he was the head of it.

So he was here and he headed up our naval architecture

department as well. I was working under Packy, as associate
director and also in charge of the Service to Industry. One day
he called from Germany. He was on sabbatical leave, and I was
acting director. He wanted me to be one of the first to be
informed that he was retiring from this office and going full-
time teaching. He thought he had served a long enough period in
that activity.

Well, of course, he had informed the dean s office because

it came directly under the dean, Mike O Brien. So I just went on
doing my thing as acting director. And he never showed up again
[chuckles]. I had this great big office, a conference room

bigger than this, and so on [chuckles]. That was kind of fun. I

was able to use a lot of my knowledge on contract research.

But in 54, when I became associate professor, things were

clearer because as a lecturer you have no research
responsibilities and therefore it was very difficult to keep up
with this activity and work over there, which I did. But I was
doing it essentially on my own time. Few people realize that
teaching as a professor, with all the graduate students that you
have, especially foreign graduate students, is not a forty-hour-
a-week job. I prepared all of my lectures at home, in evenings.
I did all of this other activity at oddball times. Weekends.
You d be surprised how many times I would be at the wind tunnel.
You know, things like that.

I truly believe, and there have been wonderful surveys of

this over the years, that the average professor really is putting
in about sixty hours a week. Just for example, to keep up with
 205

the latest books and the latest papers, going to your meetings
everywhere to hear the latest things that are happening, this was
enormously time-consuming job. People don t give it the true
credit that it needs.

So anyway, here I was, all tied up with two jobs. I m an

associate professor. Interesting little note here: You read the
History of Mechanical Engineering by Werner Goldsmith.

Swent: Yes. 1

Maslach: Well, he mentions a custodian by the name of Ben Carey, who was
over in the Mechanics Building. By this time, I had an office
upstairs in the Mechanics Building, so I knew Ben. I always got
along well with all the staff people. Half the shop was working
for me on that tunnel because it was such a big research project.
So one day I came in there early, and I am early--you know,
before eight o clock because I have an eight o clock lecture.
Ben Carey was sweeping out the entryway to the Mechanics
Building, and he said, see you re an associate professor."
"I

I said, "What?"

So he stopped sweeping and pulled out the university

bulletin and pointed down there. It was printed. That s how I
learned I became associate professor [laughter]. So it was
really quite interesting. Ben and I got along very well.

Hans Albert Einstein, Carl Vogt, and Practical Jokes

Maslach: And at this point I d like to--since we re on Werner Goldsmith s

history he mentions Ben Carey and he also mentions Carl Vogt and
some of the other people. Leonard Farber and others.
Hutchinson, Johnson, Seban--these are the older professors. One
of them, who taught fluid mechanics, open channel flow, was Hans
Albert Einstein, the only son of Albert Einstein, the great Nobel
Prize winner physicist. Hans and I were very close because we
were both sailors. He kept a boat down at Berkeley Harbor, and I
had a boat out in Richmond Harbor.

We would talk quite a bit and always had a laughing

relationship, talking about boating. Carl Vogt was the big joker

A History of the Department of Mechanical Engineering, Univeristy of

California, Berkeley. 1968-1986, Werner Goldsmith, 1986.
 206

of the Mechanical Engineering Department. He was absolutely

amazing in his creativity on practical jokes. One joke that is
mentioned by Werner casually about using ball bearings, was one
that I observed because Ben Carey told me about it. It turns out
that Hans Albert, who was on the short side, had a mailbox which
was on the upper level of three levels of mailboxes in the
entryway of the Mechanics Building. Between lectures, this is
where people kind of brushed against each other.

At ten o clock, the mail was in and Hans Albert would come
from his nine o clock lecture. He had modified the box by having
the shop build a slanting shelf in the box, and when the door was
closed, anything that was in the box through the envelope entry,
would be sitting on this slanting shelf. Then when he opened the
door, which he did with a string, incidentally, attached to the
door, there was a mirror mounted on the door so he could, from
his low stance, look at the mirror and see if there was anything
in the box, and he could reach up and get it.

But Carl observed all this [chuckles). So one day, Carl,

after the mail came in, went up and dumped a full box--hundreds--
of quarter-inch ball bearings into Einstein s box, and then we
all heard about it. I was watching from the laboratory which was
beyond the entryway there. I was just sort of making believe I
was working some equipment, watching this whole thing.

So Hans Albert came in and all the people were there,

getting their mail. And he opens the box with this string, and
hundreds of ball bearings fall all over the linoleum floor there,
which was, oh, twelve feet wide and twenty feet long. Of course,
they were showering him. And Hans knew who was responsible.
"THAT CARL VOGT!" Lots of laughter, of course, everybody, at
that little practical joke.

Leonard Farber s Mercedes-Benz and Another Vogt Trick

Maslach: Another one which Werner mentions was Leonard Farber. Leonard
had purchased a Mercedes-Benz diesel-engine automobile. I had by
that time thought about getting a Mercedes when I went on
sabbatical leave. It s kind of an interesting way to go over to
Europe, pick up a car, and you have a car to drive. Other people
had done it.

So Leonard was very proud of this Mercedes. Carl noted

this, of course, and Carl being the expert on the internal
combustion engines and so on, had a practical joke. What he did
 207

was every day in the week he wou.id open the fuel tank and pour
in some diesel fuel, the net result being that Leonard was
getting better and better mileage, and Carl would increase week
to week the amount he would pour in.

We all had coffee together, and Leonard would say, "Look at

this. I m getting thirty-two miles to the gallon." He got up to
forty or something. And then Carl started siphoning out the fuel
[chuckles], and the mileage figure went down from forty or
something down to twenty, where it should have been all the time
[chuckles]. But Leonard just went crazy, wondering what the hell
was wrong with the car.

I remember, I was in on this joke because Carl kind of

pulled me in on it. He asked me a question. I said, "Well,

Lenny, you have a warranty on the car. You bought the car. The
warranty is for a year. Take it in and tell them what s
happening." Well, he really couldn t because the guarantee
wasn t for this enormous mileage. He thought he just had some
fantastic engine.

Finally--! don t know how Leonard found out about it, but he
found out [chuckles] and practically beheaded Carl Vogt in a ,

playful way. They had all kinds of wonderful practical jokes

carried on by all of these different people. You see, when it
was a bachelor s degree-only college, you had time to do these
sorts of things [chuckles], but we didn t have that kind of
camaraderie later on. It became more serious business. Teaching
today and its research commitment is much more serious than
undergraduate teaching was in those days.

The Loyalty Oath, Not an Issue for George Maslach

Swent : I was wondering--of course, this was before you came back, but
were there any repercussions from the famous loyalty oath?

Maslach: Yes. I came back right at that point. Nineteen fifty, right?

Swent: I think so.

Maslach: Nineteen forty-nine was the year of the oath.

Swent: Right.
 208

Maslach: And so I came back right in the middle of the thing. I was not
subject to the oath at thav. point. It wasn t until 1954, at
which point everything was kind of--you know, quieted down.

Swent : It wasn t such a hot issue then?

Maslach: It was not as hot, no. Incidentally, just as a footnote to

history, when we moved back here to Berkeley, we rented a house
on Panoramic Way, 301 Panoramic. It was owned by one of the non-
signers, a woman, professor, Sociology, I believe, Hodgen. Her
father at one time was a regent and she was quite famous
therefore as a non-signer. She went to southern California and
worked ah, near Caltech, the famous museum down there.

Swent: Huntington?

Maslach: Yes, the Huntington. So she was there for a while and came back.
But then, at that point, she was close to retirement. She sold
her property and just went back down to southern California.

The one man who did not sign that I truly respected because
I talked with him about his non-signing years later was Hans
Levy, in mathematics. He was truly one of the world s top
mathematicians and a great teacher. He just refused to sign it.
Of course, he represented an immigrant from Germany. He knew why
he wasn t signing that loyalty oath.

It was a flurry, of course. I was not involved in it

because I was not an academic at the time. I had my own reasons.
If I had been given the choice of signing or not signing when I
came in 1950, I don t know what I would have done. It was wrong,
of course. It has been proven wrong in so many different ways.

Obtaining Signature Authority from Dean O Brien

Maslach: Well, I m past the practical jokes, and I just wanted to give you
one more touch of my working at the Institute of Engineering
Research. The very first summer, I had thrust in front of me
about, oh, fifty files of faculty. I said, "What are these?"
The first time I had seen the faculty file, which is essentially
confidential. It contains material for his advancement and so
on. The secretary educated me that this man is going to work on
this project, so during the summer you could work on projects
that you would obtain from the federal government or any other
agency, and draw one-ninth pay for three months. The practice
 209

was generally to draw two-ninths pay and then to take a one-month

vacation. That was the pattern.

But to get that authority, to get that money, the forms, the
bureaucratic forms you had to sign as a faculty member, and then
they had to be signed by the dean and then later on, the dean of
the graduate division because the graduate division had sort of
overall authority on graduate students work, and you were
appointing graduate students. So when you m*de a proposal for a
contract, they reviewed it at the proposal stage to be sure
graduate students were there properly, etc., etc.

But then, when the contract came, they wanted to sign again
on these forms for hiring the faculty. Well, that was absurd.
Why should they they already reviewed it. The students are
there. Their activity is a student activity. Now this man is
now going to fulfill the project requirements which were
originally outlined in the proposal. So they could review the
proposal, could review the contract, and then they had no real
authority.

So I went down to the dean, and there 1 am. At that point,

I was not even an associate professor [chuckles]. I confronted
him with this question. Well, he was a pontifical type, looked
like a minister, in fact; he had a fringe of white hair and bald.

Swent : Who was he?

Maslach: I have forgotten the name now. But he had been dean for a long
time, before Sandy Elberg. So I met the associate dean, who
would be monitoring this effort. He was a man in Anthropology,
again a name that escapes me. But I just didn t get anywhere
with them. They were just ignoring me because I was not the
dean. So 1 came back and I contacted the dean s office. This
was where I found out for the first time in my life that Mike
O Brien held a one-half-time appointment as dean of the College
of Engineering and professor. The rest of the time he was
outside, doing consulting work, primarily with General Electric.

And so my contact was with the famous Frances Woertendyke at

that time. I said, ve got all of these forms to be signed.
"I

All the files are sitting here right on my desk, on the

conference table, in fact, and it requires Mike s signature." I
learned for the first time, very importantly, signature
authority. My card, which I had signed, told me what I was
authorized to sign for and what areas of the budget, materials,
equipment, you know, hiring people, what level people,
technicians, what have you, and so on. But I did not have dean s
authority.
 210

So I said, "They re all here."

She said, "Well, Mike is coming in in a couple of days.

I ll tell him right away."

I said, "This is really important because we have got about

fifty, sixty faculty here who were not going to draw a check
until these things get signed."

She said, "I know."

So I waited. And one day Mike called, and he came down at

about nine o clock in the morning.

I used to call him Black Mike. Other people did, too. But
I used the words more often than others. He walked in and he sat
down, he said, "Now, what is this problem?"

And I explained the problem to him. Well, he had never seen

the problem because Schade, ahead of me as director, had
signature authority to be able to sign these things himself. It
had been granted to him by the dean. So I said, "You re the only
one who has the authority to sign." And so I plunked fifty files
right in front of him. I ll tell you. This is like a Chinese
wall of files. Thick. Each one maybe averages an inch thick.
And so he got all these--

And he just picked one off the top and looked at it. He
couldn t believe it. I said, "The whole thing is stupid because
the graduate division signs after this. Why they should have
authority is beyond me." Even they admitted they weren t quite
sure why they were signing off on it. But they wouldn t talk to
me because I m not the dean. He looked at me with that famous
black look, and he really did look darker when he became
frustrated and irritated, I think he kind of held his breath, and
he would flush. And he had a darker complexion, so that he did
get a darker look. And he had these piercing black eyes that
would go right through you. And he just looked at me, looked at
these files and he got up. Didn t say a word. Walked out.

Well, I was wondering what the hell was I going to do! You
know, here I am. And so--I didn t have to wait very long.
Twenty minutes later I got a call from Frances, asking me to come
up and sign the form, signature authorization form. They
neglected to sign any form for me when I was acting director; I
was not given any form to sign, and I wasn t given Schade s
authorization. I just had my own authorization when I was
associate director, for some little things.
 211

So I went up there, and I signed the form, because you have

to have a special signature on the form, and Mike O Brien had
signed this [chuckles]. So I now had signature authority.
That s a very important lesson in the bureaucracy of this
University. I swear, far less than 10 percent of the people who
work here ever know what a signature form stands for, but it s an
extraordinarily important document. It really tells everybody
what you are able to do, the clout that you have.

Swent : It gives you a lot of power.

Maslach : Oh, yes. So anyway, I got signature authority for more than I
expected. But I just wanted to get rid of those forms. But he
essentially gave me signature authority for the directorship,
without giving me the title. He took the title of director, and
I was the associate director, but I had all the signature

authority.

A Bureaucratic Victory in Getting Contracts Approved

Swent: Were you able to streamline the process at all?

Maslach: I then signed all of the forms and got my car and drove down to
the graduate division, which was in California Hall, and I took
pack by pack of these files, and I dumped them on the associate
dean s--of the graduate division desk. It just covered his
desk. He had no room for it because he had a small desk. So we
were putting them in bookcases and so on. I said, m
"I

interested in what you re going to do. What do you need to know

before you sign that form?"

Here they have the most valuable documents of a man s life.

This is what his career is based upon within the university.
There s a form on the top; there s a proposal and a contract.
Well, you can read the proposal and you can read the contract to
make sure the contract follows the proposal; then you can sign
it. It really should take you maybe fifteen minutes each. But
the ability to look at these files, which had a lot of
interesting data about the personand some of these people were
famous, you know, or infamous.

What happened was this was the beginning of summer, about

one week or two weeks into the summer. But what happened was
that these files would come dribbling back. We had a call from
the graduate division and would send a messenger down because
these fileswe would not trust them in the mail. We had to take
 212

a messenger down and pick up the files and bring them back. It
took the entire summer to get the fifty, sixty iles signed.
:;

Swent: And this happened every summer?

Maslach: No. This was the one summer, the first summer that I was
associate director.

Swent: But it had presumably gone on other summers.

Maslach: Oh, yes. And so the last man was a professor of material
science. He was a metallurgist, good friend of mine. I just
felt that this was so ridiculous that I had to do something. I
had to explain what had happened. So I went up to his office.
He didn t know what the hell I was there for. [laughs] I just
sat down. I said, just
"I want you to know that eventually you
will get your checks. Your form was the last one of those signed
by the graduate division, and therefore you will get all of the
money for the summer in one big check." He was laughing and glad
to hear it. He thought it was such a ridiculous thing.

Learning How to Operate a Research Establishment

Maslach: So that was my job during the next semester. Since I was now
appointed, with signature authority, I had a little more clout
somewhat, and so I just started pushing. I had my reputation of

being a signatory for that original contract, and so I really had

a little bit of clout, you know, without having a title of
professor. And so I just campaigned and within the semester, the
graduate division agreed that there was absolutely no reason for
them to be involved.

They had been pushed into it by the accounting department.

Why, I don t know. And so the whole thing just ended at that
point. In many respects, that was my first bureaucratic victory
at the University of California [chuckles].

Swent: A big one.

Maslach: And it was. From then on, the forms were signed in the Office of
Research Services, at essentially the dean s level, by somebody
like me, and that was it. And the payment was made immediately.

Swent: Where were these files normally kept?

 213

Maslach: These were the dean s files, or the department chairman s files.
I would imagine under these conditions, either the department
chairman files--yes, they were. And so as a professor, I am
proposing to work two months on this contract and that contract
and so on, and here I sign the forms. That s to get me the
money, okay? This was all like auditing, accounting, I sign to
do this work for two months, okay.

So the file would come from the department and go back to

the department. But to me it was just one of the greatest
bureaucratic messes, you know. It was a jungle. And it shows,
though, how the university was changing. You know, we didn t
have this bureaucracy imposed upon us when we were a bachelor s-
degree-only university. There was practically no contract
research of this kind going on. But now it was, and we over
reacted with all kinds of conditions, which we then slowly would
relax as we learned how to operate a research establishment.

Sam Silver, a True Genius

Maslach: Also, while a lecturer but associate director of this Institute

of Engineering Research, I had a wonderful ability to help
people. The one activity I m going to describe is one that
involved John Whinnery and Sam Silver. Sam Silver was a true
genius of major proportions. The space laboratory up on the hill
is named after him. Years after he had died, why, I was the
speaker at the dedication of that building. I must say when I
finished my statement up there, the tears were flowing down my
cheeks because I truly believe that Sam Silver was one of the
great influences on the development of the College of Engineering
into the graduate field.

He also was a man--came from the Radiation Laboratory at

MIT. He was in theory of a theoretician. He of course knew all
the people at MIT at that time. We had that same kind of a
background, so we were able to speak. He was a quiet speaker.
He and John Whinnery were the true leaders in the very beginning
to change electrical engineering into the department that it was.

He had a magnificent abilitySam, that is--of putting

everything down into fundamentals and coming through as a
classical scholar. His ability to simplify any problem and then
lead you into solving it was truly great. I used to use him all
the time, just to sit down and talk philosophically. He would
come to the dean s office for something, and I would immediately,
when we finished that something, ask him a question. I asked him
 214

the question, "Sam, what do you expect from the public school
systems for your children? First at the grammar school, grade
school level up to the sixth grade, then junior high school and
then high school." And we had a long, wonderful, philosophic
discussion on this.

Basically, he just--in the first six--

Maslach: Basically he believed that the school system should not kill the
child s interest in learning. He said there s really nothing of
great knowledge, interest and so on in the first six years.
Certain fundamental techniques: learning to read and write and so
on. But you just want to be sure that they were not turned off
at school and that in junior high school you get into something
that s more meaningful in terms of skills and techniques, in
terms of science and algebra, but nothing in depth, but algebra,
certainly, and things of that nature. And writing. He was very
big on languages.

And then in the high school, you know, that s where he

expected them to do some teaching and the student to learn, and
at that point he really felt--that he didn t expect much in the
way of teaching until college. All of it was kind of
preparatory. Yes, the last two years of high school, yes.
Science and mathematics and that area. Also, of course, he never
slighted the humanities. He always was big on the humanities.

He had a very unique view. Now, it s a view for the people

who were going to college, and it s not a view for the people who
would terminate their education in high school. But to sit here
and listen to him talk, he was sort of like a rabbinical scholar,
and was giving you some very, very sound information. I always
remember listening to him. He was a man I always listened to.

I later found out that for years he was the chairman of the
dean s committee reviewing files for the advancement of faculty.
That s where he played a key role. His ability to really know
what this man might be able to do. He had a better judgment on
faculty appointments than anybody else I knew at that time. 1

really admired his ability to do that.

One day I m sitting in that office, and--

Swent : Where is that?

Maslach: Office of Research Services.

 215

Swent: Where was it?

Maslach: That was in Building T-3, which no longer exists. A temporary

building. Temporary buildings- -when I was a student, there were
temporary buildings in the glade. They were there as remnants of
World War I, and they were used in teaching aeronautics. They
were removed and immediately in World War II a whole string of
new T buildings were put into the glade.

There s a little history here of the university campus. The

Botanical Garden used to be in the glade. If you walk through
the gardens there, through the glade, you ll see notices on the
trees, for example, of what the tree is, so that the glade, all
the way up and down to the Agriculture Building was a botanical
garden, and so that World War II had put in those first temporary
buildings--! m sorry. World War I had put in the buildings.
They moved the Botanical Garden and put it up where essentially
the Memorial Stadium is.

The director of the Botanical Garden had a house right there

at the beginning of Panoramic Way, on which he could look down on
the whole area. Well, when they moved the garden again to put up
the stadium, which was dedicated, I think, in 1929, he just left
the university [chuckles], and the botanical gardens were moved
up into the canyon, where they are now still in existence. I
don t think they will ever be moved again [chuckles].

Making an Illegal Transfer of Funds to Save the Electronics

Research Program

Maslach: So anyway, here we are--here I am in this T building, and I had

just received, the week before, notification of the university
grants money for research. Now, the university grants a certain
amount of money through the budget from the state for research
for all professors, and you put in proposals of what you re going
to use that money for. Now, the total amount of money for the
College of Engineering at that time was probably on the order of
fifty thousand dollars. The grants to faculty therefore were
small.

There were two kinds of grants: faculty research only and

faculty and student research, in which you were paying a student
a small stipend. So it was about $50,000 that was allocated for
Engineering Research, to be divided by them through the research
 216

committee, appointed by the dean, representing all of the

departments .

Well, we didn t put out that money until the fall, when the
proposals came in. So there I was, holding $50,000 in a purse
[chuckles]. Nothing to do with it. And in came Sam and John
Whinnery, two people 1 had enormous respect and admiration for.
I ll tell you the year it was. It was 1958. I had been promoted
to professor, so I was now a professor, full professor. I
remember the year because I was on the visiting committee at MIT,
and MIT was going bankrupt because a man by the name of Charles
Wilson, known as "Engine Charlie" because he was General Motors,
was Secretary of Defense. He had held up all research contracts
to universities. This had gone on for months. You can t do
this. What are you going to do with these students? What are
you going to do with these professors who are half-time on
contracts?

MIT was using its endowment money to pay people. I was

there and helped them to build up a big scream of the private
institutions, and eventually they were able to get the president
to override Charlie Wilson. What happened was that these federal
contract monies were being held up for my contract, from the ONR.
But it so happened that the date of my contract was sufficiently
far advanced that the new money was not affected until later on.

But Sam and John had their electronics research laboratory

money held, and they were going broke, right now. I don t know
if it was Sam or it was John or both together--came up with a
brilliant idea of a short-term loan of the "615 money." That was
the number for the university research money for Engineering, our
code number. That was our accounts number, really. If we could
use that money to tide us over the summer, maybe Wilson will
release the money to us eventually and Sam and John would be able
to get the money back to us later, in the fall.

Well, it was a great idea--

Swent : Where did the 615 money come from?

Maslach: That was state money. So it was a great idea [chuckles], but I
was the only one, or the dean, that could sign this. I was the

only one with signature authority. The dean was not going to be
doing it. He was not going to be around. And this crisis was
now. So here I was, with these two wonderful men who had reached
these enormous positions in the history of science and
technology. They were sitting there, asking for me to sign a
paper to loan all this money to tide them through the summer.
 217

I think that that little decision was in a way much bigger

than the decision 1 made with those forms [chuckles] and Mike
O Brien. Here I was, you know, $50,000 in the hole, you know.
And it wasn t my money. It was state money. And it was going to
be used for research, but in a way not defined by the state. And
it s their money. And yet I could see the tragedies surrounding
all these students, all of a sudden laid off. What are you going
to do? Everything will come to a grinding halt.

I just remember sitting there, looking both men straight in

the eye [chuckles) --lots of eye contact and I just said, "Okay."
I went out and got an authorization form to move the money from
this account, 615, to that account. Strictly illegal. Strictly
illegal. And I just moved $50,000. Fortunately, within the
summer, two months, money from the federal government came
through and it was returned. But it was before the research
committee met in the fall that I had the money back in my hand.
But no one ever has known about that. This is the first time
this illegal transportation of money [chuckles] has been
revealed .

Swent : It s case where what was right and what was legal were
a
different .

Maslach: The accounting procedure I used was totally illegal. I was never
called on it. The accounting people within the Office of
Research Services handled it, and these were people working for
me. They looked at me [chuckles] with a strange eye, but 1 did
it. It kept the electronics research laboratory going during the
summer.

And you know, it s the sort of thing that I feel was part of
the times, and yet it reflected my own upbringing I tried to give
you in the earlier interviews, where I was willing to take a
chance. I m willing to do things. I m a doer, not a talker. We
spent maybe fifteen minutes, and we did it. This is the way I
like to feel that I moved from then on because in my teaching,
you know, I would throw a piece of chalk, and people would learn
physics, [chuckles]

So it was a part of the times.

Swent : You did take a big risk, though.

Maslach: I did take a big personal risk, and I don t know what I would
have done, really, when you get right down to it. I never
thought about it again after it was over. I really didn t. I
always remember John and Sam thanking me profusely, time and
again. But it was the sort of thing that I did in that time.
 218

VI FULL PROFESSOR OF ENGINEERING, 1958 to 1963

Changing from a Research Engineer to an Academician

Maslach: So we re now up to roughly 1958. I had been going on, doing

research. I was active in all kinds of academic affairs, and I
was doing bureaucratic things in the Institute of Engineering
Research. 1 was half-time appointment in 1954. I got a lot of

ribbing from my wonderful colleagues [chuckles] because when it

was printed in the bulletinwhen my first appointment, I should
say--I got a lot of ribbing because it was written in the
bulletin, "half-time"--you know, paren 1/2 and then associate
abbreviated as Professor and everything [...]. And so
"ass".

Carl Vogt and all the other people in the Faculty Club: "Oh,
half-ass professor." [laughter] That made sense. They really
know you! So in 58, when I became full professor, I was no
longer half-time. I was full-time. I got the ribbing from the
people: "Oh, no more half ass [chuckles]
."

So I had plunged into academia in 1954 to 1958, and I truly

had to immerse myself into the whole academic process. I did
become a professor, from a research engineer, and 1 studied, and
it was different from a person who had that wonderful background
of taking a Ph.D. and having gone through the academic process in
large part as a student, with his research professor. I missed
all of that. And so I was now having doctoral degree students
and master s degree students, and I did not have those advanced
degrees. I was being successful at it. I was writing papers
right and left.

Swent : Did you ever feel that it really made any difference?

Maslach: What do you mean by that? I don t understand.

Swent: Well, did you feel the lack of these advanced degrees at any
time?
 219

Maslach: Oh, no. I didn t ever feel it made any difference. I was never
discriminated against. In fact, I would have to spend all kinds
of time outside because I would go to a meeting in Washington,
D.C., or something like that and they would have my place tags
for me for Maslach," and I would have to say,
"Dr. m sorry,
"I

I m not a doctor; forget it." Well, people would ask me at a

much later date, "How come this happened?" and I said to them,
you know, this happens all the time within the university,
especially within the professional schools and colleges in which
the Ph.D., doctor of philosophy, is not the end degree. We have
a doctor of engineering degree as well as a doctor of philosophy.
You can really talk in terms of differences of criteria here.
And a doctor of engineering degree is one in which you really
solve a major problem.

What happened was that during my times at MIT and General

Precision, and even the first years heYe, I solved many, many
problems. And so people would look at my MIT experience and say,
well, hell, that was the equivalent of graduate school. I have
always put it a different way because when I, in time, learned so
much more about the whole process of appointment and promotion, I
just said my appointment proves that the system works. There s
nothing in the system that says you have to have that degree. It
might mention a degree or equivalent or something like that. But
it shows that quality is recognized.

Just to jump way far ahead, I remember the appointment of a

full-time faculty member in the College of Environmental Design,
with tenure, full professor, who finished high school, period,
and that s all. But the man was fantastic. Just an amazing
fellow at that time. And there were other kinds of examples that
I could cite, without mentioning the names, of people who have
made it in this regard.

The Story Behind the Double Promotion

Maslach: Just kind of jumping around here a little bit, I was promoted
from associate professor, step whatever, to full professor, step
two, which is a double jump. I couldn t understand why I was

given that double jump until years later. In violation of the

confidentiality requirement, a man that was on my promotion
committee told me why. It was a rather interesting story. I had
been asked to go down to Mt Hamilton because one of the things I
.

was expert in was gearing, just mechanical gearing, movement; and

this is part of my machine design background at MIT, development
of precision gearing for the radar, and later on, at GPL.
 220

And so I didn t know what the problem was. The director of

the laboratory down there, said he would have a car with a driver
take me down on Sunday. 1 couldn t understand that. It was a
real cloak-and-dagger kind of an operation. I got in the car
with this driver, and there was a professor of astronomy with me.
It turns out that he was a man who knew me back at MIT. And so
we had a long, wonderful drive down to Mt. Hamilton, talking
about MIT.

When I got there, we had coffee, and the director of the

laboratory informed me of the problem. You go out to the dome,
and here s this big gear, which is about twelve feet in diameter,
in the frame holding the mirror, which, incidentally, is a blank
that had been cast about half the diameter of the big Mt Palomar .

telescope. Maybe two-thirds of the diameter. The blank was

good, but it was just sitting there for years. So they got it,
polished it, and made a telescope.

They had all kinds of subcontractors in the design of this

telescope, and the gearing was made by a very prominent, very
good firm. But the putting together of the whole systemthis is
where a failure occurred. Always when you teach-- I taught, from
practical experience something falls between the chairs. This
firm develops the gears, and they re perfect. This guy designs
the equipment, and it s perfect. Now we re going to assemble it.
But the gear people are not going to do the assembly; somebody
else is going to do the assembly. Hey! What s the liaison
between these two groups? There was none.

So finally, basically there was a machinist assembling this

thing on the mountaintop and he made an error, and he made an
error because he did not understand the theory of gearing and he
did not understand the specs. So what was happening, they turned
on the power and guess what? Chips of the gear were coming down
from up on top there. They re chewing the gear to pieces. The
big gear was bronze. The small gear that was driving the pinion
was steel. The steel gear could take it, but the bronze gear
couldn t .

So they ran some experiments and viewed some planets, and

the planet, instead of standing still, was going up and down,
like this [demonstrating], in a sinusoidal fashion. And so I
took that photograph, and the astronomer had already done the
analysis. I said, "What s the frequency?"

He said, "It s the geartooth frequency on the big gear."

I said, "That s what I expected." I said, "I know what the

problem is, but I ll have to prove it to you."
 221

Solving a Gearing Problem at Mt. Hamilton Observatory

Maslach: So I climbed on that big thing. I was way up in the air. I was,
like, thirty feet up in the air, without any safety straps or
anything [chuckles]. And I made a casting of the geartooth by
using in one place a plaster of Paris type of a material, and in
another place the more rubbery type of material. But they set.
It wasn t hard material, but it was like plaster of Paris would
become, but it was quite good. And I used the castings to show
where the damage was done.

I brought it down. I had brought together with me all kinds

of measuring equipment, large micrometers and all kinds of
things. I really stunned them with all of my measurement
devices. So I got down there, and I did all this work, and by
that time it was lunch, so we had lunch. It s a wonderful little
colony up there, you know. They ve got some houses and some
people there full-time.

Swent : I was there just not too long ago.

Maslach: Most of the people live down below, you know, and drive up that
road.

Swent: Beautiful drive.

Maslach: Yes, beautiful drive, wonderful road. So anyway, we had lunch and
everybody is kind of looking at me, wondering what I was going to
do next [chuckles]. I felt like the sorcerer there. So I went
out there in the laboratory, measured the pinion, and I got down
these castings. They had to set; they took time to set. And I
measured them carefully, and I pointed out all of the grooves the
damage, and then I made the computations for the gear tooth and
showed where in a gear there is what is called an addendum and a
dedendum. Those are the two parts that work, one on the other, so
the point would come in on one gear here [demonstrating] and roll
and ends up at this point on the other gear here.

Well, when the pinion came in here on the big bronze gear,
the setting of the two gears, the distance between the
centerlines, was wrong, and it would dig into the root of that
gear. These are all technical terms. What happened was called
tip interference. The tip of the pinion would dig a groove in
the root of the big gear, so out would come little pieces of
bronze [chuckles]. I said this is called tip interference, and
then I gave a lecture on gears and gearing, and showed how the
rolling aspect works and why they were getting this oscillation
in this path of the planet, because it was not an involute
 222

rolling process because the tip had dug in and there was no
involute there. "Involute" is a description of the curve of the
gear tooth.

Well, you could pull the gears apart. You know, it s a

simple thing to do. But basically you don t want to do that too
much because then you get backlash, too much play between the
gears if you pull the gears apart. So I went through the
computations. I could not measure the distance from the center
of the big gear to the distance of the center of the small gear,
but this is essentially the critical thing that should have been
done.

What the machinist had done when he had assembled it was he

had just put a shim between the gear faces, f ive-thousandths-of-
an-inch shim, and then just blocked the pinion. He had not
measured--he should have measured the distance from here to here.
That is extremely difficult and has to be a custom-made measuring
device. And so I said that was what had to be done.

Well, it turned out that everybody knew that something was

wrong, so everybody had instituted a lawsuit. We had a lawsuit
from the general contractor to the sub and the subcontractor to
the gearing manufacturer, the gearing manufacturer to the main
contractor who had done the assembly, etc. The whole thing was
just a circle of a dozen legal suits that had been filed.

The whole thing was secret because they could open up the
lockers and get the blueprints out on Sunday [chuckles]. They
had keys, which they shouldn t have had, and they opened up the
contractor s lockers and spread the drawings. That s why it was
all done on Sunday, when only the staff was there [chuckles).
They closed the gate on the top there and wouldn t let anybody
in, all Sunday.

It was cloak and dagger, for sure. I, then that afternoon,

just dictated a report to a secretary. She typed it right up,
and I signed it, and that was the report for the director. I
wasn t involved in the legal suits and so on, but they all
evaporated when the gearing contractor was called in for a small
amount of money to do the proper installation. The gears today
are still damaged in the root, but that root doesn t operate when
it is properly meshed.

What happened was that when my case for a full professor

came up, it was a strong enough case to be promoted to
professorship. But the chairman argued that this was a fantastic
thing that I did for the university [chuckles], this one little
report sent by the director of the Mt Hamilton Observatory to my
.
 223

file, unbeknownst to me. He just wanted the dean to know. Great

commendation, you know. How valuable this was. And so something
I did, which cost me one Sunday [chuckles], and that was it. It
was a wonderful drive down and a wonderful drive back [chuckles].

I was driven back by the driver from the observatory; the

astronomer friend of mine did not come. Nick stayed down there.
He was working down there. He just came up to make sure that I
was the guy that came down. So on the basis of that work at Mt .

Hamilton, they gave me a jump start up to step two [chuckles].

Daughter Christina s Parallel Career

Maslach: It has been fun, just as a side issue t to talk about this
because, as you know, we have a daughter, Christina, in the
Department of Psychology. I kind of followed her degree, her

advancement, so I know when she became full professor and when

she went on to different levels. Without going into the details
of this [chuckles], she made full professor at roughly the same
age that I did. I was ahead of her a couple of years, but she
was right behind. She has gone up the ladder and had
accelerations, double jumps. But she has just followed
essentially the same type, and now she s on special salary, which
is above the published rank.

So many steps. There used to be only four steps, full

professor and special salary, but now they have seven steps, I
think, and special salary after that. We went into special
salary about the same age [chuckles], so she has been picking up
on me [laughs]. It s kind of interesting to think about all this
history, and then having it repeated with a daughter in the same
area. As I keep telling people, I am no longer known for what I
have done at the university, but I m known as the father of
Christina [chuckles].

Swent: She has been outstanding.

Maslach: I would like to finish up that period of the fifties up to 58 or

That was my period while I was doing bureaucratic work in
60.
the Institute, from 54 to 63, when I became dean. That was the
ten-year period that I was a professor. Do you follow me?
Remember my ten-year schedule?

Swent: Right.
 224

Maslach: Well, this was the period. Sure, I was doing that other work,
but I was doing research. In 58, Sputnik was fired, and it was
a lot of concernwhy aren t we doing this and so on. Well, all
of a sudden, our project became famous. We had done all this
work, and all of our reports which were unclassified were sent to
Russia, as we later learned directly, when I was talking to
Russian scientists. This was all unclassified. They could just
pick it up and don t even have to put it in a diplomatic pouch.

So they had no research of this nature at all. They used

brute force and awkwardness to put up a very large satellite.
All of a sudden, there was just enormous pressure upon us as a
project to do more, get bigger and this and that. We knew that
our project was a very useful project, of course; but it was a
scientific project, and the wind tunnels they were talking about
being built were ridiculous and did not have to be built.

We had done enough of the basic science and the engineering

was there to do the design of the satellites.

Swent : This was still the work on the spheres.

Maslach: Oh, well, it was not just spheres. Excuse me. I better

Research on Drag on Cylinders

Swent: You hadn t said what else you were doing.

Maslach: We turned out hundreds of reports. The first one I was just
telling you about Enos Kane and spheres. Rick Sherman worked on
drag of spheres. Other people. My best work, in my opinion, was
when I did the drag on cylinders. I had a very unique technique
in the wind tunnel of holding the cylinders and screening the
edges, the ends of the cylinders so that they would not have any
tare problems. That s a technical term.

I don t want to get into details, but if you look at

Maslach: If you look at any space station-type equipment satellites, what

have you you re dealing with fundamental, basic geometric
shapes: spheres, cylinders, flat plates, and so on. And so drag
force measurements in the wind tunnel concentrated on those
things as fundamentals that would be then useful for any designer
and aerodynamicist Years after I did that work, I would be
.
 225

getting questions from people. In fact, just a year or two ago,

I got a letter in the mail, asking me for a report which was
issued back in the sixties. [chuckles]. It s kind of ridiculous
because much of what was in those reports has already been
translated into the literature.

But I also did a very nice job on drag on cones, which is

another fundamental shape. You know, cones, angle of attack, not
just cones straight into the stream but also at angles.
Professor Larry Talbot went on and did the theoretical work which
augmented that experimental work that I did. So we had hundreds
of reports of all kinds. Going to this region, which is the last
region where you can use normal fluid mechanics, and then the
region where essentially you have what is called free molecule
flow, and that is that individual molecules hitting the
spacecraft is what counts, and you can compute all of that. But
basically in drag profile, the drag coefficient is on a
trajectory here [demonstrating with hands], and free molecule
flow is back up here. And in between, what is the curvature of
the drag coefficient term between here and there? That s what we
were doing in this wind tunnel.

Service on the Research Committee of the Academic Senate

Maslach: So Sputnik, as I said, created a whole new period for us in that

environment. If I may kind of backtrack, I truly embraced the
academic world. I want to point out that the constitution calls
for there being an Academic Senate. Now, it doesn t say what the
Academic Senate is going to do, but in the standing order of the
regents, which come outnew standing orders all the time, the
Academic Senate had control of teaching content; they had control
of admissions standards and therefore the content of the
coursework; they had control of the standards of the degree. So
the academic side of the University of California resides in the
Academic Senate. The president and chancellor do not have that
authority. That authority is delegated by the regents to the
Academic Senate. So there s this working together of the
administration and the Academic Senate.

The greatest activity, of course, is in coursework and the

appointment and promotion of faculty. In the coursework, the
committees, the graduate committee, which created the graduate
division, and the undergraduate committee, these are enormously
powerful committees. One of the things that I now came into was
the ability to be appointed to these various committees. I
 226

enjoyed this because it was a whole new world. You know, of

academia.

The one committee that I truly enjoyed the greatest was the
research committee. I was appointed to that, obviously, from my
research background and all the other activities I had been
involved in. It was just wonderful to see them distribute
research monies and how they did it campuswide, how the academics
proposed to use the money and so on. I was not only a member for
years but as chairman for a number of years. During that period
of time, there was this

Alan Renoir and Rhesus Monkeys

Maslach: Let me give you a little story: There was a famous motion picture
director, [Alan] Renoir, son of the famous painter, Auguste
Renoir. He was over here on leave from France, and he was in the
Dramatic Arts Department, and he wanted to write about academia
and research. What are you--how do you do research? And so he
asked if he could sit in on the research committee meetings, Alan
Renoir. He became a professor here. He was in the French
Department.

Anyway, he sat--a wonderful man. He would just listen

intently as these academics around the table here would argue and
make decisions discuss not argue so much, you knowthe
,

validity of this proposal, the degree to which we should fund it

and stuff like that.

One day, I was chairman and a special request came in from

an animal laboratory down in the Biosciences. Due to a failure
of a steam heating valve, an entire colony of monkeys had been
destroyed. They were killed when the valve allowed the heat to
rise to enormous temperatures, okay? And here is the life s work
of a group of faculty. Here the monkeys, which were going to be
the study, with years and years of observation destroyed. And so
the hope was that the research committee would allocate funds to
replenishin fact, establisha new colony. These were the
Rhesus monkeys, you know.

It was a wonderful project with enormous influence on health

and disease. You just looked at this and I sat there, and I
suddenly looked to the side because Renoir used to always sit to
the side. He never would sit at the table. And he was crying.
Tears were rolling down his cheeks. I just suddenly realized
what it was. It was this imagery. Here was this famous motion
 227

picture director, and the imagery for him was this colony of
monkeys over the weekend, trapped in a room and killed. He saw
it. We looked at it from science and so on. And I can
understand why he wanted to sit in on our research committee
[chuckles] meetings. So we just pulled him up to the table and
we talked about it. Of course, we made the decision to replace
the monkeys. It took a big chunk of our money. But I remember
that as one of the better decisions of the committee.

Wo also funded in the odd ways, little things that suddenly

were important. So we would have the money in order to do that.

The Faculty Club and Networking

Maslach: I really and truly enjoyed academia. I had joined the Faculty
Club earlier, when I was a research engineer, but I never really
understood it. It was when I was teaching, even as a lecturer,
I would go over there for dinner because I was staying down in
the office to grade papers or something, and I would sit down at
the chemistry table. Here was Seaborg. Here was McMillan.
McMillan I knew from MIT Rad Lab, you know. Here are all these
people, and I would sit and have lunch and talk with them. And
this is the way academics were to me. The club was the heart of
the entire system.

If you look into the history of the club, it truly is the

basis for, the center for networking. Not as much today as it
was then because we have a larger faculty and we tend to be more
spread out, and the club is not central. It s close to Physics
and Math and Chemistry and so on. Faculty Glade is not
conducive, say, to Christina, who is way down on the north end of
the campus, northwest corner of it, in fact, It s a long
distance to walk over to have lunch.

Enjoying Serving on Faculty Senate Committees

Maslach: But really enjoyed this activity, and I soon becamewas

I

appointed to committees that reviewed the career of a person:

Should they be advanced, how far advanced, etc. --the appointment,
the promotion. I got into that process during that period of 54
to 58.

Swent : Who made the appointments?

 228

Maslach: Well, the appointmert is finally made by the chancellor, but if

you read the academic personnel manual about that thick
[demonstrating] --it has a section on appointments, about that
thick [demonstrating], which I contributed to in large part when
I was provost and even when I was dean. The rules of who has
what authority to search; first you have to get the position, the
FTE, full-time equivalent faculty member. And the budget says
you must appoint at assistant professor level. You might be able
to argue that and get that augmented so that you can get one at a
tenured professor level. But in general, overwhelmingly, you
want to appoint at the assistant professor level. We ll get into
that in the deanship business.

But then you go down through all the rules and regulations.
The appointment proposal is from the chairman, through the dean,
and must be approved by the dean. And then it goes to the vice
chancellor of academic affairs, where he reviews it and submits
it to the budget committee, which is a committee of the Academic
Senate. They will appoint an ad hoc committee, who then review
the proposal and make their opinion known. The budget committee
will then advise the chancellor. That s written into the rules
and regulations. And the chancellor will then act.

He can take the advice of the budget committee, or ignore

or not ignore it. He ignores at his peril. But he could come up
with a decision other than the budget committee. We re jumping
ahead to when I become provost.

Swent :
Right.

Maslach: In this process a chancellor has final authority. Quite often,

the chancellor will delegate authority at the assistant professor
level to an associate vice chancellor or provost. But for tenure
appointments and promotion to tenure and promotion to full
professor, he alone has the authority, and it s not delegatable.
So it s a very complex process, and takes time but it s an
extremely good process. I will defend it with anybody on this.
It really brings the entire campus you have essentially a
quality control system on this, and you don t judge just an
engineering faculty by engineering standards but you judge them
by college, by campus standards and so on.

Swent: I was wondering: On these committees did you sort of indicate

your interest in serving on a committee before you were
appointed?

Maslach: No, not then. You now do that. That s a fairly recent change,
about ten years ago or so. The Senate would send out a statement
asking you to put down your interest in various areas. But in
 229

the beginning, no. And the people who control that--if you
really want to get into the Byzantine functions of the Senate is
the Committee on Committees. That s an elected committee,
elected by the faculty members, not an appointed committee,
elected.

So very democratic. I never was a member of the Committee

on Committees. However, I notice that Christina has been a
member of it several times [chuckles]. But she has been heavily
involved in the academic side.

I got into this academic mode. In fact, I got into the

business of being on these committees, the review committees,
they are called, and I served on quite a few of them. I was
serious about getting the job done fast in those committee
activities. When I was chairman of a committee, I would
personally [chuckles] write the first -draft and then I would
walk it over to a committee member, one. I d pick it up, take it
to the next committee member, and so on. I would never allow
these things to dwell because some of these committees take
months in order to get their work done. I just pushed it, pushed
it. So I got a reputation for someone who got things done.

I one time was asked to chair a committee in June, after the

semester was over. That was a hateful thing. Here you re doing
your research. You re heavily involved in all kinds of other
and "Would you do that?" And I did it, and I pushed it
"Okay."

through fast. One member of the committee disagreed with the

general report, so he had the right to put in a minority report,
so we put in the majority report. Oh, a month or two later
[chuckles], the minority report came. By that time, the man had
been promoted [chuckles]. No question. So I had a reputation
for that kind of a thing.

A Prize-winning Presentation to the American Institute of

Chemical Engineers

Maslach: But Itruly enjoyed everything during that period. I really

began that nine-year academic periodyou know, going overseas
and giving talks. In fact, my first paper was presented to the
American Society of Chemical Engineeringthere were two
societies. I m not sure I got the right name there. But I went
to one of their annual meetings and was talking about vacuum
systems. Here we have this enormous vacuum system here. So I
gave a paper. They gave two awards. The American Institute of
Chemical Engineers, excuse me. That s the name of the society.
 230

Swent : Chemical?

Maslach: Chemical Engineering. Put it as a--

Swent : No, you said "Chemical," but I m surprised. I thought

mechanical.

Maslach: No, it was Chemical Engineering. And so the two awards were for
the content in terms of new information, and the other one was a
prize for presentation. They put in the award for presentation
to get people to give good papers and good presentations. They
had a wonderful manual on how to give a paper and how to do the
slides, everything. I used it meticulously. And when I came
back home a month later, I was informed I had won the prize for
the best presentation [chuckles]. So that was my first paper at
a society meeting.

Swent: Wasn t Chemical Engineering a little bit of a departure?

Maslach: No, because chemical engineering is heavily involved in heat

transfer and fluid mechanics, so it s a natural, really. It was
a wonderful thing. What I want to stress is I plunged in with
both feet into the academic side. It was really fun. To me, it
was the greatest fun.

think we ought to kind of stop here now because 58 is a

I
critical year. It s the year that I went on sabbatical leave for
the first time, and it was the big year for the Sputnik and the
rarefied gas dynamics. There was a paper every day.

Swent: The sixties are coming up.

Maslach: We ll get 58 to 63 very fast, and then the deanship will start.

Swent: Okay.

Sputnik and Upper Atmosphere Dynamics Research

[Interview 6: January 19, 1999] ##

Swent: We re in the conference room at The Bancroft Library, and it s

January 19th, 1999. This is Interview #6. Last time we had

gotten up to 1958.

Maslach: Fifty-eight was a very critical year in my life and actually in

the life of the nation as well. At this point, I can speak
 231

knowingly, more completely about my activities, which took a

sudden turn fcr internationalism. As everybody probably recalls,
in 1958 Sputnik was fired by the Russians, and the first
satellite started going around the earth. You probably remember
that odd noise as it went by, and you would see, actually, the
trail under certain optical conditions. Sputnik, to get an idea
of scale you actually could--

Swent : Could you actually see it that clearly here?

Maslach: You could see the trail, actually. You couldn t see the two-
foot-diameter Sputnik, but you could see the trail or the
condensation. It was very low. It wasn t high.

Swent: There must have been less air pollution then than there is now.

Maslach: Also you got the sun glinting on it. .That was the way I saw it
because my house faces out to the west, and if we had the
conditions where the Sputnik was coming by near sunset, why, you
got a good idea of--it was very interesting. So Sputnik was
about two-foot in diameter, with a couple of antennas sticking
out in the back, something like television rabbit ears of the old
television sets. The largest item that the United States had
shot up into the atmosphere was called by the Russians,
derisively, the grapefruit. It was about, oh, six inches
diameter. But actually, the grapefruit contained more
electronics and research equipment for the United States than all
of Sputnik did, even though Sputnik was big.

The big decision had been made by the Russians to use large
thrust rockets. They always had the ability to put bigger things
up into the atmosphere than we did because we never had the
thrust conditions that they did. They had these big rocket
engines and they could put up massive pieces.

It became, of course, the big year when there was a big

debate: Were we number two to the Russians in technology and so
on? There were major changes in education: more science, more
mathematics in the high schools and so on. For me, the big
change was the fact that I had been doing research, along with a
number of other people here at Berkeley, on upper atmosphere
aerodynamics. Now, when people started screaming, "Why aren t we
doing research in this area?", why, we were able to come right
out and say, do research in this area.
"We We ve been doing it
since 1947."

Dick [Richard] Folsom and Mike O Brien started thinking

about this way back in the days of the war and thought that there
would be need for upper atmosphere aerodynamic research. We got
 232

started with a research program, under the sponsorship of the

Office of Naval Research, in 1948. What we did was to build a
wind tunnel which could simulate the conditions in the delicate
area where you leave the earth s atmosphere and enter into space.
This was always considered to be a problem area. If you came in
wrong, for example, you could burn up the equipment. You had
sort of a window of space through which you could shoot, going
out. You probably recognize it. When they miss a shooting
opportunity now, they say, "Well, the next time we can shoot is
such-and-such a date." So you do have to take into account
atmospheric conditions.

To give you an idea, if you re a hundred miles up in the

atmosphere, molecules are so scarce that the free molecular path,
which is a technical term, is how far a molecule will go before
it hits another molecule. That means at a hundred miles altitude
the force molecular path is roughly a hundred feet. So
basically, a missile up in those areas is just being hit by
molecules every once in a while. That s how rarified the
atmosphere is up there. That s why you do space walks and all
those other things. And you can have these satellites whichwe
now have about fifty satellites up there for television and
communications and so on. They re just going around in a
synchronous pathway. I don t know how many satellites there are
above the state of California, for example. They re there, all
the time.

We had been doing this research, unbeknownst to a lot of

people, except the Russians, who used to take our classified
reports and send them to Moscow in the regular mail because they
were unclassified reports [chuckles]. We knew nothing about what
research they did until 1 met some of these people, Russian
scientists, later, in 1966.

Sabbatical Leave in Europe Sponsored by NATO-AGARD

Maslach: So 1958 dawned with Sputnik and guess what? I got a telephone
call from NASA predecessor, NACA, asking if I would go over to
England and give some talks about our space research. It was
about time for me to take a sabbatical leave. We thought about
the kids. It was just perfect timing because they were then
eight, ten, and twelve. They were not in critical years of
schooling. If they dropped out for six months, why, it would be
okay.
 233

Swent : Excuse me. I think that the last mention you made of your
children, there were only two.

Maslach: [chuckles]

Swent: The third was born after you came to California?

Maslach: Yes, in 1950 he was born. Christina, who is now a professor here
at Berkeley. Jamie, who was next. He owns and operates a big
company down at Emeryville. Making glass candles, amongst other
things a lot of glassware. And Steve, who is the artist, a
sculpture and glass person up at Bainbridge Island. But they had
been moving along, and I will get into their upbringing at this
time, too.

Up to this point, there had not been much discussion in the

United States about space. What happened was, of course, you
would hear this noise in the radios and so on, and you would look
up and look for that thing, and you knew that there was something
passing over you and it was Russian. You knew roughly that an
atomic bomb was about the size of a basketball, as an example.
Here this thing was about two feet in diameter. How did we know
that there was not an atomic bomb up there that would be coming
down on us?

This is what energized this big American push to science and

move ahead in space, send a man to the moon (which came later, of
course), and all of this activity. And here we were, right in
the middle of it. We had been doing all this research for years.
All of a sudden- -we were first unknown, and then international
stars. I, as I said, checked with various people, and the
sabbatical leave turned out to be sponsored by NATO-AGARD, A-G-A-
R-D. That s Advisory Group for Aerodynamic Research and
Development. It was headed up by Von Karman, the great
scientist-engineer who had been at Caltech for many years and who
had done a lot of work in a number of fields: heat transfer and
fluid mechanics.

They contacted me and asked if I could give a number of

lectures throughout Europe while I was on sabbatical leave for
six months. I agreed. That was the end of that, for the moment.
I went first to England and gave papers there at the Royal Air
Force building. This was the first time the people in England
had ever even thought about the activity, even though they had
gone through the V-l and V-2 problems of World War II.

I went to NATO headquarters in Paris, first picking up a

small Mercedes. I asked, "How many lectures do you want me to

give?"
 234

The man s last name was Guillaume; it s actually William in

French. Roland Guillaume. He was one of the vice directors of
NATO. He said, m very sorry, but this is a real problem. We
"I

sent out to all of our organizations asking if they wanted to

hear you, and everybody wants to hear you." He says, cut it
"We

down. Could you give thirty lectures?"

Swent : Oh , my !

Maslach: In all the different countries of NATO. I said, "Let s see how
we could schedule it because I m supposed to be on sabbatical
leave and doing refreshment and thinking of my research. I need
time for that." So anyway, it ended up I did give thirty
lectures in 1958.

Swent: My goodness. Was it the same lecture?

Maslach: No. What I did was I prepared basically five different lectures.
I gave one or the other. Some places I gave more; others, less.
But I started in down south. Guillaume had figured out the best
thing to do--this was Januarywas to start in Italy and just
move up with the weather. And so I finished up in England and
France. But it was a wonderful, wonderful experience for me, of
course, technically. One could imagine for me the value of such
a period of time. I met all of the top people throughout France,
England, Italy, and Germany.

Lecturing in Aachen to the Top People in Aerodynamics

Maslach: I will just tell a couple of small stories about the lecturing.
For example, in Germany I lectured in Aachen. This was the
famous university where Von Karman, in fact, used to teach. When
I came into the lecture hall, I noticed in the front row some of
the most famous people in aerodynamics. These were Germans who
had been taken over by the Russians and were Russian wartime
scientists. For example, boundary layer theory, which I will not
try to explain to you--

Swent: What was the word again?

Maslach: Boundary. Boundary layer. Two separate words. The man who
developed it was a man by the name of Schlichting. But there
were a number of these people. There s Schlichting and others
right in the front row, and I m saying, "Oh, brother." These are
the people that you studied their books. These were the people
 235

who started many of the big research activities of the world in

heat transfer and fluid mechanics.

So I went through my first lecture, and I was absolutely

dumbfounded by the reaction. I just was totally in a zone. I
didn t know what was happening because what they were doing was
they were pounding on the little shelves, which were attached to
the backs of the seats. In other words, if you were sitting
facing the podium, there would be the person in front of you, and
his seat back had a little shelf which you could put down and
take notes, write on. These were being pounded with their fists
[pounding table with his fist]. This was the applause.

You had about a hundred people there in a fairly small room,

a comfortable room. And they were just making this racket, which
I couldn t--! never heard anything like that before in my life.
I kind of looked and nodded. I was aved of course by the man
who was running it, the master of ceremonies. He came up and--
didn t tell me that was applause, but gave his thanks for the
lecture and said, "You know, we are just barely starting on this
program. Our thinking and this lecture has been wonderful, but
I m sure you have more to say." He said, "Maybe we should have
some coffee. Could you give us a second lecture?"

I said, so I went and I gave, after coffee, a second

"yes,"

lecture. More applause. I went after that with all of themnot

the students for lunch, wonderful lunch--and came back and gave
a third lecture.

Swent :
My goodness.

Maslach: So I spent the day with them. After the third lecture, I came to
a rather obvious ending point.

Swent: What were you talking about?

Maslach: First there was a lecture which was essentially on the physical
equipment that we had developed: the wind tunnel, which was a
very unique wind tunnel that simulated the conditions up that
high. The pressure in the wind tunnel when we were operating was
on the order of, oh, fifty to a hundred microns of mercury. A
micron is one-thousandth of a millimeter, so you had 760
millimeters up here of mercury for the full atmosphere; we re
down to very, very low atmosphere conditions, well under a
thousandth, the atmosphere, that you experience here on the face
of the earth. So the equipment building was a big aspect.

We also developed techniques of flow visualization. Even

with those very low pressures, the technique of exciting nitrogen
 236

by an arc upstream. You would get a glowing gas, very similar to

the aurora [borealis], same process. This aurora glow was sort
of an orange-green glow, was coming down the stream in the wind
tunnel, and if there was a shock wave, it would show a shock
wave. So flow visualization was an area that I spoke to.

And finally the various kinds of research that we were

doing, which was the drag of forces on spheres. I had later, I
think--yes, it was. Later I did a major program on the drag
forces on cylinders but also drag forces on flat plates.
Basically, you re doing the aerodynamic forces on standard
objects. Space stations are essentially made up of spheres,
cylinders, and flat plates. And so that s what we were doing.

Besides the research, I always threw in part of one of the

lectures on our educational system and how we operate. They were
very interested in how we got money for research from the federal
government, things like this. Now, Germany, especially Aachen,
is in one of the wealthiest parts of Germany. They get money
from the state, and they also get money from the province, and
since the province was rich, why, they do very well. But if you
go to other provinces which are up against the Russian border,
which they were in those days, the province doesn t have money
for such things as space research. They will give money for
agricultural research and so on.

Well, after this applause died down, I then saw the German
system at work. The call went out for questions, and of course
the people put up their hands. The people in the front row, who
had professor titles, would be called one by one, by rank.
Schlichting was the first, and so on. They went down the line.
And then they would go to the second row, and then they d go to
the third row. By this time, you were starting to get into
graduate students [chuckles]. A lot of time was taken up in
questions and answers. It was just amazing how the hierarchy
worked in that whole system.

Schlichting later went on to become the professor at

Goettingen, a university over near the Russian border. He asked
me back to Germany later. I worked with him on research

proposals, writing research proposals for his state and also for
his province.
 237

Thirty Lectures in Six Months

Maslach: But that kind of excitement was repeated in France, where I gave
four lectures over a two-week period in Paris. And I followed J.
Robert Oppenheimer. I spoke in a small auditorium. His lectures
were first organized to be in the small auditorium, which I used,
but they were so heavily publicized and so many people wanted to
hear him that they had to move to a major auditorium. They had a
real riot in the Sorbonne, when he spoke the first day, just to
get seats, get tickets.

So I spoke there, and I spoke at various other places in

Italy and France. In Rome I spoke in a building that was
designed by Michelangelo, right near the Colosseum. It had been
a church building. When I was lecturing, there was a knock on
the door. It was Easter week. The man who was the master of
ceremonies, the professor there he went and there was some
whispered conversations at the door. In came a priest and two
altar boys. Basically, they blessed the room, which was a
procedure which was done throughout Rome, and in south Italy, in
fact. And so when I was ready to talk, the Italian professor
said, "Your talk has been brilliant up to now, but it will be
better because you have been blessed." [laughter] All of these
people a lot of officials, from the Air Force and so on. A lot
of government people involved.

We went from one city to another, and then we had times out,
when we were able to be by ourselves, and I was able to do more
thinking. I wrote two papers during that time [laughs] and gave
one of them at the World s Fair in Belgium. There was a
technical meeting. So it was just an exciting period of our
life. The children really grew up.

An Exciting Holiday for the Family

Swent : Do you want to give the names or the titles of the papers?

Maslach: Oh, no. Ican t even remember. We started off this big trip,
actually, with a skiing holiday in Austria. We had this car. I

picked up the family in Genoa. They came over on a ship. We

went from Genoa just to Bologna and then took a train up to
Innsbruck and over to St. Anton. In those days, in 1958, ski
school one morning or afternoon session a ticket was
essentially twenty-five cents per hour. When you put your
children into the ski school, they essentially were being taught
 238

by members of the Austrian ski team. It was a babysitting

operation because you never saw them; they just went off and did
their thing. You saw them at lunch. So we had ski lessons,
babysitting, etc., for essentially one dollar each for this and
fifty cents for lunch. It was a great time. They are now all
expert skiers.

After skiing was over, we would take off our boots and take
our skis and leave them at the slope, and then with after-
skiboots we would walk down the main street of St. Anton. Along
the sides of this village were just dozens of coffee houses. You
would go in and the children would have hot chocolate, which was
just wonderful, and we of course would have coffee, and they
would have all of these wonderful, filling, caloric pastries.
You never saw pastries like them, at that time. They always
would ask, if you came in, "Mit schlagl" meaning did you want
whipped cream. Whipped cream--they took this huge spoon, about
the size of my hand and scooped up this whipped cream and slapped
it down on whatever pastry you had ordered. This was before
dinner [laughs ] .

We were in a little ski lodge in which the young women- -high

school girls, essentiallywere doing the work. In the early
morning we would wake up to their singing. They would sing in
chorus, together. It was just as though we were in a church,
listening to the choral group singing. So we had a marvelous
time there. We just had a lot of fun.

One funny part was I was a pretty good skier, but I wanted
to improve, learning the Austrian technique. The head of the ski
school, named Rudi Matt, brother of famous Toni Matt. So Rudi
said, up there and do a few turns."
"Go So I would go over
there it was a little hill--and so I climbed up and I raised my
pole and he looked at me, and I did a few turns. The hill was
just perfectly manicured. The snow condition was just absolutely
ideal, so I did a lot of good turns.

Icame back and he said, "Oh, you re good." He said, "You

go with Egon," and I went with Egon. So Egon gives me a little
wooden token and tells me we would meet at Gimsel. I found out
that Gimsel is the very top of the mountain, and so I go up on
the top of the mountain with a lot of other people in the big ski
lift. When I got up there, there was a little hut. And you go
in the hut and you can order all kinds of things to eat and
drink. Early in the morning, everybody was having Tee mit Rum
[laughs] So anyway, Egon came and he startedhe just gave us
numbers one, two, three, four you know, ein, zwei, drei. And
down the hill he goes. And you follow him, in that order. And
then he s constantly looking back over his shoulder, and then he
 239

stops and gives criticism. This was the technique. Well,

fortunately, I was around sixth or so. There were about ten. By
the time I got behind him, we were down into another area. He
was giving minor criticism of something.

In the ski class was a wonderful young woman who was Swiss.
When she found out that I was a professor and doing all these
things, she pointed out a sign in the ski lift, "constructed by-
engineered by"--the name of the man was given, but in front of
his name was Herr Doktor Engineer. She said, "Now, if you were
here, it would be Herr Doktor Engineer Professor." [chuckles]
This is much more important in the scientific fields in Europe
than it is here. We had a good time. She was my translator,
actually. She spoke perfect English, plus French, Italian,
German [laughs], everything.

We had that kind of a holiday during that six months. We

visited areas. Doris had found some books which were put out by
an organization in Baltimore for State Department workers and
their families.

Swent: Calvert School.

Maslach: Calvert School. We had several of those books with us. They
would give lessons in art, and there was the art right in front
of us--and when we were in Italy and France and so on. They had
books on the history, of course. The history was there because
there would be all kinds of displays. The church was prominent
in all of this history of Europe. So they had a very fine
education abroad.

What happened was when we came back, none of them lost time,
and one of them was kicked up [laughs] --skipped a semester. It
was not a loss as far as the family. Of course, knitting the
family together, it was a fantastic experience. We just went
through all of these nations. Everywhere we went, we were
greeted at first by academics and we were at all kinds of social
events. It was kind of heady for a family at that time.

My research work really paid off in developing the social

activity that we had when we were in Europe. We met many
families and stayed, and became close friends with them. For
example, the Deviennes [Marcel Devienne] in Nice. He had done
research in this field in physics for his doctorate. He had a
private school. We got to know them very well, and their
children. We still see--in fact, we saw Jaqueline recently, they
split. She is no longer Devienne; and has remarried. But the
wife was here, oh, a couple of years ago.
 240

A Quantum Leap into International Research ##

Maslach: Marcel Devienne. Anyway, we just kind of went into a whole new
life, international research. From then on, 58, our research
was not just from the ONR; we were working for the Air Force; we
were working for NASA. We just took a quantum jump in activity.
This was a big push from the United States at that time. We were
in conversations with people everywhere.

We established a technical organization, an international

one. The first meeting was in Nice in 58 and then every two
years thereafter. We had meetings in Nice, Berkeley, Oxford, and
other centers of research.

Swent : What did you call the organization?

Maslach: Oh, I ll have to look it up. [laughter] It was very informal,

really. It was just people who were working in the field. But
it was rarefied gas dynamics. We put out our volumes of papers
every two years, and we went from Nice to Berkeley to Paris to
Oxford to Ottawa, Canada. Just had meetings everywhere. I lost
touch with them because nowadays I have moved out of that field,
but it was a very exciting time, is what I m trying to get at--
right in the middle of Sputnik.

We came back, of course, to the United States, which

[chuckles] was kind of a letdown after living out of a car, our
little Mercedes, the three children in the back and my wife and I
in the front; we just had a wonderful time, going from city to
city and finding a place to stay and so on.

The research activities were wonderful from then on, from

58 until63, when I became dean. Just five years of hard work,
teaching and being involved in all of the academic affairs of the
campus. The previous years, from 54 to 58, having been
appointed associate professor in 54, this was one of my decades
of activity, which was different.

"A Standard Berkeley Academic Family. Very Involved"

Maslach: It s hard to say just exactly what happened in those years from
58 to 63 except that it was just a big period of being an
academic. The children, of course, were growing up. Christina
had gone from twelve to seventeen; graduated in the early sixties
from high school, where she was an outstanding honor student, and
 241

went to Radcliffe for her undergraduate work. At that time,

Radcliffe was separate from Harvard administratively, but you
took all your classes at Harvard.

The boys were growing up. Jamie was quite an athlete- -

marathon runner and so on. He, more than the other two, really
latched onto the High Sierra work that we had done in that
period. When Jamie was about nine until college days, why, he
was up in the mountains all the time. In the beginning, with me.
And once he had learned how to take care of himself in the
mountains, why, he used to take kids from high school on trips up
to the mountains, hiking all over the Sierras. We took him one
time, Doris and I, to the lower end of the John Muir trail, and
then he hiked the entire length of the John Muir trail, at high
speed because he is strong in the legs.

Steve had moved along at his pace. He had decided he wanted

to go to high school in San Francisco, so he took the examination
for the private high school, Lick-Wilmerding. In those days,
they would take the first top--whatever--sixty people or so, and
he was one of them. So that period in there, I was driving him
down early in the morning so he could catch the bus over to San
Francisco with other people who went to Lick-Wilmerding, and then
I d pick him up in the evening. That meant that I would always
get into my office early [chuckles].

We were just active in everything. Doris s activity, of

course, was in the political realm. We started doing that in
1950, when we first moved over from San Francisco. But there
were elections every year for council or school board or
something. Eventually, we turned the entire school board around,
she doing most of the work. But in the early days, both names--
my name and her namewould be involved because that s the way
the PTAs operated, with a co-presidency, for example. I would

help gather votes here on the campus because I was beginning to

become known. She, of course, would work her system outside.
Very well organized.

Just a standard Berkeley academic family. Involved

politically, locally, and very involved in research and the other
activities. The campus, of course, was going through lots of
changes. You have to go back and try to remember. This was
before FSM [Free Speech Movement]. We had people like Clark Kerr
as chancellor, and we also had Professor--chemistry--Glenn
Seaborg as chancellor. Then, when he went off to the AEC [Atomic
Energy Commission], why, then we had Ed Strong as chancellor.
The expansion period for the Universitynew campuses everything
was going on at that time. It was an enormously active period,
the fifties.
 242

Swent : Yes. The new campuses--up until then it had only been Berkeley
and UCLA, right?

Maslach: That s right, at that point. That s all.

Swent: In those years--

Maslach: Well, Davis and Riverside were large agricultural research

stations. They had enough room and were close to populated areas
that they became campuses. And then, of course, in the period
that we re talking about-- 58--it was one of the big years in
which things got organized in higher education. The master plan
of higher education came into being at that time. We ended up
with Santa Cruz as a university. We took over Santa Barbara from
the state system, and they took over a campus, the Kellogg-
Voorhees campus, south. It became a state college. Then, of
course, we went further, later, into other campuses. But it was
a big period of expansion.
 243

VII THE COLLEGE OF ENGINEERING CHANGES ACADEMICALLY

Dean O Brien Sees the Need for Five Years and Research

Maslach: I want to then speak to the changes that occurred in this period.
The College of Engineering was going through a separate academic
change. Few people remember or probably even noticed, but Mike
O Brien was chair of a committee in the American Society of
Engineering Education, which published a short, terse report,
which was the changes that were necessary for engineering
education. This was actually work that had started earlier; it
started earlier than Sputnik. But Sputnik did a lot to energize
this whole movement.

That short report, which I think is the cornerstone of

engineering education for the nation, basically said professional
engineering education requires that you have another year, a
master s degree. This is common. Public healththere s a
master s degree in public health. If you go to any of the
professional schools and collegesmaster s degree of business
administration. It s not just enough to have the bachelor s
degree; you needed a graduate year.

This got pushed, and the concept of doing research in the

engineering sciences and the practical application of engineering
to problems all started about that time. It was only about a
five-man committee. I always remember reading that report--

Swent : This was across the whole nation?

Maslach: Yes, American Society of Engineering Education, which people

thought of as a very dull society and rather organized to
undergraduate education only. But he was part of the first
official graduate movement. He was pushing that here in
Berkeley, even before that by his appointments of various people.
Some of the major appointments of people that I have known and
talked about were made at that time. He wanted to start Naval
 244

Architecturemove that and make it bigger. He was able to get

the top man in Naval Architecture in from the navy, "Packy"
Schade. There were only about three schools in naval
architecture. He made this one a major school of naval
architecture .

Swent : We had talked a little bit about him.

Maslach: There were other people, like Harmer Davis, Earl Parker, and all
those and John Dorn, who was a prolific researcher and graduate
teacher. That s the period, of course, where a lot of other
people suddenly became important. One of the people, Sam Silver,
together with John Whinnery. Don Peterson came. There were just
all kinds of new looks in each of these departments. We picked
up quite a few of those people, as I said, before 58, but it
went on.

O Brien Retires from the Deanship and the University

Maslach: The big change that occurred in engineering locally, officially,

was that Mike O Brien decided to leave the deanship and to
actually retire from the university. Now I m going to tell you
my version of the story that I heard from other people at that
time. It might be a little disjointed because my sources came at
different periods during this time. But I became dean in "63,

and John Whinnery was 1959 to 1963.

Before I went on sabbatical leave, I remember meeting with Mike

O Brien because he and I saw each other quite a bit in the
operation of the Office of Research Services, which I described
earlier.

Swent: You mentioned your streamlining the processes of getting

contracts .

Maslach: Loaning the money to John Whinnery and Sam Silver; I always
remember that.

I remember walking across the campus with Mike after he had

had a meeting at the Faculty Club with the faculty of the
department of mechanical engineering, of which I was a member.
He was describing to me essentially what had to be done. What I
realized was that in the department, there were two stratas.
There was the group of faculty, much of them older, who had come
through engineering when it was a four-year degree program, and
 245

who had taught in a four-year degree program. In other words,

their whole life of engineering was a four-year degree.

And now along comes the dean and says, ve got to go to a

"We

fifth year and graduate work in research." Mike expected some of

these people to just change over and become researchers. That
didn t happen. That just did not happen, especially with the
older people. And so there was a need to get in new faculty.
Some of these people I just mentioned, the superstars, came in
about that period of, oh--sorae earlier, some later.

Mike in my mind never knew precisely what had to be done.

What had to be done, of course, was to bring in some new people
and to start a whole new program. He understood the need to get
more graduate students and get that as the vehicle for the change
in the whole program. I must say at that point I couldn t
understand why we were doing all of these things because the
other thing that Mike said we had to do was to go from a one-
department college to a multiple-department college.

Well, we were kind of departments, but we were not

departments. We did not have budgetary control. We were
divisions. We were divisions of the department of engineering,
which was under Mike O Brien. He was chairman and dean. He had
total control of everything.

Now, the story as I understand it--and I think it s the way

it went there was enough rumbling of various people, at first
within engineering and also outside of engineering, in the other
colleges and schools, of this operation Mike O Brien was having
over here in engineering. Engineering was 12 percent of the
campus; you couldn t ignore it. And they were not organized in
departments, and they did not have the leadership coming through
as it would, say, in L&S [Letters and Science], where you had
forty, fifty departments and all kinds of chairmen and leaders
coming through.

So the operation of the Academic Senate, which requires

professors from all areas to be heavily involved in the Senate
was stymied by Mike O Brien. As 1 think I might have said, I
went to one of his first meetings when 1 was appointed and heard
that we should just ignore the Academic Senate. He had had some
bad problems with getting appointments and promotions through the
senate process, the budget committee and the chancellor. I did
not know any of this at the time.

But obviously, Clark Kerr as chancellor had a meeting with

Mike O Brien and said, have to reorganize, and you have to
"We
 246

change your method of operation." Years laterthat s where we

get disjointed

Swent : You mean the College of Engineering.

Maslach: College of Engineering, excuse me. The College of Engineering

had to be reorganized. Years later, when I became dean and I was
able to talk quietly with Frances Woertendyke, one of our first
meetings, in fact it was before July 1, when I was officially to
take overwe were sitting in Mike s old office, and there s this
little old wooden desk. As I might have already said, I opened
the drawer, a file cabinet drawer, and a rich smell of bourbon
came out of that wooden drawer. I had a look and I said,
"There s a story behind that."

She laughed and she said, "Actually, it was on a day like

dark day she said,
this"--a knew- Mike was there.
"I It was
after five o clock. I just knocked on the door and came in, and
he was sitting there, with his famous scowl, "Black Mike" no
lights onhaving a drink of bourbon." So she went and got a
glass and joined him! He told her the story that he had been
told ordered by the chancellor to reorganize the college and
make it a multiple-department college.

And that s when he decided to quit. He didn t quit

immediately. He went through the process of reorganizing the
college and then left, with John Whinnery becoming the dean. So
that is, quote, "the story" of why the College of Engineering
went from a one-department, a one-manager operation to a
multiple-department college. I never confronted Clark Kerr with
the story, although we were good friends. I m sure he has his
version, which is not much different because he admitted in later
years how much Mike O Brien did for engineering as a whole.

It s hard for me to translate to you all these differences

that were going on. Here we had these national, international
differences of science; the Cold War and Sputnik and the race for
space. I intimated to you the race for essentially military
control of space, using weapons. And then, on the other hand,
here we are in the state of California and we re expanding the
University of California like mad, and then down at the campus
level we re reaching maximum numbers of students and were having
internal space problems and all these things.

And then here at the college level, we were told we have to

go into multiple departments- -one, and then we had to go into
graduate work to a much larger degree. I mean, there wasn t one

phase of my life that was left sitting still. Everything was

moving. Everything was just get going. Of course, for me, the
 247

kids were getting into the teens. This was a whole different
period of living as far as we were concerned of going off to
college. So everything was moving like mad.

Swent : You had also built a house.

Maslach: Yes, a rental unit in 52. We built a second rental unit in 54,
and we built our house in 56. So just think of all of those
things .

Swent: That s a lot.

Maslach: The fifties was just a fantastic growth period for the family,
and change for the college and growth for me.

Swent: I don t quite understand why setting up departments in the

college was such an issue. Why was that?

Maslach: What happens when you set up a department is that the chair of
the department has budgetary control over his share of the total
budget for the college. He could sign off. As I told you,
there s a little card that says, "Signature authority." It tells
what you can sign for and what you cannot sign for. Can you buy
a box of pencils or can you not? This means that now I can go
out and start searching for faculty. I can present names of
faculty to then be approved by my department, my college, and so
on. So instead of one person being the chair and going out and--

Swent : The dean of the college.

Maslach: He was both dean and chair, so he was able to bring in people.
He found people himself. He was a one-man recruiting team in
certain respects. Not all of his hires were good, but a lot of
them--I gave you some nameswere very good.

Swent: So setting up departments does put a layer of authority--

Maslach: The dean s layer of authority is above that. The dean has to
fight the rest of the campus for budgetary resources, and he has
to do other things. I will get into that when 1 was asked to
become dean.
 248

Dean John Whinnery and Chairing the Dean s Coordinating Advisory

Council

Maslach: The period of John Whinnery s deanship essentially extended at

that point until 1963. There was an interim dean, Bob Wiegel,
between 1957 and 1958. Let me kind of answer your question about
all this problem of organization. Why was it such a big thing?
Well, in the old days, you might see Mike at the Faculty Club or
you might see him having coffee when he was here. He was half-
time, remember. Always keep in mind he was only half-time.

Swent: That s right.

Maslach: I would see him every once in a while, maybe only three times a
year, whereas now, when John Whinnery took over, he set up a
Dean s Coordinating Advisory Council. DCAC. This was modeled
after the chancellor s equivalent. the chancellorial level,
"At

he met with all of the deans as well as all of the directors of

research institutesmaybe thirty people as well as top business
leaders in the business office.

You would meet weekly, so you got to know what was

happening, what the issues were, what are we going to do. We
discussed it. The chancellor, of course, was in charge, but he
took advice from people. Same thing with the deans. We
discussed all matters of import in terms of the curriculum, the
advanced degree work, research activities, the space development
(which was a big thing), and buildings. If you look at
Engineeringjust go outside here and just look up there, you ve
got that monster of a math building, but there is all kinds of
new building work being considered, that were developed during
that period of time.

It went from a one-man shop, where you usually got your

information from talking to Frances Woertendyke, to a multiple-
man shop, in which each discipline and each organized research
unit was represented in these weekly discussions. This was the
biggest single thing that happened in the reorganization.

Swent: This happened under Whinnery?

Maslach: Well, it was started under O Brien. I give him great credit
because he really stuck it out and really followed through on the
orders from Clark Kerr. He did a wonderful job of setting up
this structure.

The period under John Whinnery was a transition period. We

were all kind of hustling around, doing these things, and putting
 249

out proposals for what we wanted to do as a department. Within

mechanical engineering, my own department, we had been further
fractionated with groups in engineering design, heat transfer and
fluid mechanics, applied mechanics, and so on. We were not
really a single department. To some degree, this continued, but
we did organize ourselves into a single department, a single
identity, in this whole thing.

It was really, as I say, a creative period. There was lots

of steps backward e.nd forward. It wasn t all just "Excelsior".
We went up the cliff, you know. We just did all these little
things .

Swent : And a lot of personality adjustments, I m sure.

Maslach: Yes, the personality adjustment, going from basically an

undergraduate activity to something which now is basically a
graduate activity. We were right in the middle of this whole
thing. The problem of changing curricula, of course, is that it
takes time. You change curricula in time with the students that
we get. That meant we had to go out and recruit students at the
graduate level. We had not really done this before. We also had
to look at our own undergraduate students as potential graduate
students. This was never pushed hard before. There was kind of
a change here in which graduate teaching and activity was
dominant now because it was in our thoughts all the time. We
taught our undergraduate courses, but we were thinking what we
wanted to do in graduate work.

The period, as I said, under John was essentially everybody

kind of getting readjusted to this new organization, working
within their own departments to a large degree, as they were
organized, and learning how to operate with a budget, which a lot
of people didn t understand. In fact, I hate to tell you but all
through my deanship and provostship, I could point out to you
departments that really did not have any idea of how to operate
within a budget. They never knew what budgetary controls there
were. They just thought they could take this money and use it
here or there, but you can t. So you have to learn an awful lot
about the operation of the university as a whole, especially the
business side of the operation of the university.

got thrust into all this, of course, at the college level

I
because I was director of the Office of Research Services. I
attended all the meetings of this coordinating board and so on.
As you can tell, I m outspoken. If I have some ideas, I put them
out. It turns out that maybe of twenty people on that DCAC
operation, about ten really were interested in doing some things
 250

and about ten were sort of coasting along and listening more than
they were talking and producing ideas.

Swent : How was this council selected?

Maslach: It wasn t elected. It was the chairmen of the various

departments and they were elected by their department. The
directors of the organized research units were already in
existence because these organized research units had been
operating. It was a good way to reorganize engineering. There
was no question about that. We had wonderful discussions with
strong people Earl Parker from material sciences and mineral
engineering, and Don Peterson and others, Sam Silver from
electrical engineering. There s Harmer Davis, Harry Seed, others
from civil engineering. And mechanical engineering our chairman
was Sam Schaff.

Mechanical Engineering Department Chair Sam Schaff //#

Maslach: It s sort of late in all this discussion we ve been having to

mention Sam Schaff. It s rather interesting that Doris and I
were over at the de Young Museum the other day and we ran into
Sam Schaff and his wife, Phyllis. We hadn t seen them in some
time. Sam and I were working together on the rarefied gas
dynamics program from 1950 on, or from 1949 on is a more precise
time. He became the senior research person because he took over
from Mike O Brien and Richard Folsom, who kind of gravitated away
from research activity.

So he and then later on Larry Talbot and Frank Hurlbut, who

was in the program, became the leaders, along with me, of course.
Sam was trying desperately to reorganize mechanical engineering
when he was chairman of the department, but he had a difficult
job because there were such strong feelings in each of these
different groups. Applied mechanics and engineering design were
really always at odds. So we in heat transfer and fluid
mechanics were people trying to bind everything together
[chuckles]. It was difficult for Sam.

I remember there was one vote, essentially, which was on a

single-department matter. The vote was almost even; there was
one vote more for this than for that, and so he was never given a
mandate to do the various things within mechanical engineering.
He struggled, and he achieved things [chuckles], but it was a
wonderful example of this transition from undergraduate teaching
to graduate teaching. All the graduate students were in two
 251

areas over here, and all the undergraduate students were over
there. Really, this is the way it was. So there were schisms,
and all these schisms within the department had to be repaired
during this period. That s the legacy of Sam Schaff and John
Whinnery, dealing with this reorganization and making it finally
come to pass.

None of us realized that John Whinnery had no desire to stay

on in the deanship. In his oral history- as you probably
noticed, he had an agreement with Ed Strong that he would be the
dean only for four years. I always remember that at the end, we
were all getting kind of nervous--f irst because we never saw any
,

activity by Ed Strong or anybody at the chancellor s level in

terms of searching for a new dean outside, and nobody inside
seemed to be knowledgeable about anybody being proposed within
the college.

I had thought immediately that Earl Parker or somebody like

his stature would be the next dean when John did say that he was
going to resign. We had meetings after meetings, in whicb.--tb.is
is now the last six months of the year and you really should
have a dean taking over in July 1 already known to everybody on
January 1. And nothing had happened. We saw no motion, no
activity. Usually, you know when somebody is searching because
people write you letters and ask your opinions and want to know
about this or that. So we were all in the dark, and we were
really worried.

I can remember when John and Sam Silver would be talking

about this. Sam in many respects was a very interesting fellow
in the development of the college and certainly one who has never
been recognized for his input. He for many years was chair of
the confidential committee, basically a budget committee, of the
College of Engineering. The budget committee on campus here is a
kind of misnomer. On other campuses they call it the Academic
Personnel Committee. It receives the cases for appointment,
advancement, and promotion and then sets up ad hoc committees to
review the proposal and then advise the chancellor. That is its
function: to advise the chancellor on these matters. Should the
person be appointed, advanced, or promoted; or should he not?

Sam s committee internally did yeoman work. It had a lot of

people being proposed. The cases were presented with this
awkward one-department division arrangement, through Mike O Brien
and down to the chancellor s office, where the budget committee
exists. Under Glenn Seaborg and probably under also Clark Kerr--
but I do know Glenn Seaborg s period very welland also for a
few years under Ed Strong, our record of getting our appointments
 252

and promotions was abysmal. Approximately 35 percent of the

proposals we made were honored.

Chemistrythe college of chemistry is right next door--I

later learned were given approvals, like, 100 percent, or 99, 98
percent.

Swent : You mean they were being approved--

Maslach: By the chancellor. I didn t know at this time, when John was
dean, that this was the situation. I knew that we were not doing
well because I was made a member of this internal committee with
Sam Silver because another member of the committee had ignored
the anonymity and the confidentiality and spoke to a man who was
up for promotion in derogatory terms, publicly. It was a bit of
a scandal for a few days. And Mike just appointed me as a member
in place of this other fellow.

So here I was, an associate professor, reading material on

full professors [chuckles]. I, of course, had been on ad hoc
committees set up by the Budget Committee a few, but not many
during that time, so I kind of knew how the process worked in
general. But I didn t know how it worked in detail. But what I
did learn from Sam Silver on that committee was what a tower of
intellectual strength that man was. He had, to me, I think the
finest judgment of the worthiness of a new applicant, whether
that person would make it or not. He had the best measures of
whether this was adequate for promotion. To me, he was sort of
the hidden dean for academic personnel, all these years that Mike
O Brien was dean. And, in a way, John Whinnery. He was the
person in the back row, reading these reports and saying, This
man should be or This man should not be.

And so we worked on this committee and read these reports

and proposals. I really learned a lot about Sam Silver. I
always treasure the fact that when they named the space sciences
lab up on the hill for Sam Silver, his family and also the people
up there asked me to be the keynote speaker. I spoke, and when I

got to the very end, the tears were running down my cheeks. I
was trying to speak and cry at the same time. I always was close
to Sam, and had a very, very nice relationship. It came from
being on a committee together. But he truly was of the
"one

cornerstones of this college in ways that people still don t

understand.

Swent: The work behind the scenes.

Maslach: At the end of John s period as dean, he truly made sure that he
was going to leave. He sold his house. He was going to the ETA
 253

in Switzerland--! won t give you the full name because I don t

remember it myself --but it s a famous research organization in
Switzerland. He had made arrangements to be over there. He was
on sabbatical leave; he had that all approved. And there was no
new dean. I m not kidding! This was getting to us. March came
along February March. And all we were doing at these
,

coordinating meetings was "Have you heard anything about the

"Who--"
deanship?"

Well, rather late in the game, Ed Strong took a trip

throughout the United States, a quick trip. There were several
people he wanted to see about this deanship. Somebody,
obviously, he saw in the Midwest said, "What are you doing?
You ve got the best dean there is in John Whinnery. You ve got
all kinds of people if I had the number of leaders here that you
have at Berkeley--" He gave Ed Strong kind of a little lecture,
Ed Strong being a professor of philosophy. A wonderful,
wonderful fellow.

It basically was, you go outside for a dean if you want to

make major, major changes, and there are personality problems
that you cannot deal with inside. But if you ve got strength
inside, you work from strength. "What are you searching for? Go
back and search within the college."

Swent : Did Strong tell you this?

Maslach :
Yes, he told me this later, when I became dean. I remember he
mentioned other names. He mentioned, again, Sam Silver; he
mentioned Earl Parker and, I think, Harry Seed. You know, there
were a number of good people in the college. Some people would
not take it, incidentally. You don t automatically take the
deanship or a chairmanship; you can deny it. So anyway, we heard
about this and we heard from these various people that he saw.
We didn t hear details, but we knew that he had seen so-and-so
here and so-and-so there.

The term ends. The teaching ends in May [chuckles]. So we

had a meeting one more time. I just seemed to be more eloquent
than usual at that moment. What bothered me was that I didn t
think that anybody on the other side of the campus--the
chancellor s office, president s office, anywhere --re ally knew
what they had in engineering. I thought I knew, with my

experience with Mike O Brien, John, and all the rest-

administratively .

I also knew academically how good it was.

But And so I
said, just don t think they know what is needed.
"I
Basically,
they don t know engineering. All these years, they were kept in
 254

the dark by our organizational methods, and they just don t know.
They don t even know the people that we have." And so the
decision was made by John that we send a committee to meet with
Chancellor Strong in his office and present the case for the
college: what it needs.

I was a member of the subcommittee to go down to meet with

Ed Strong. Packy Schade, Harmer Davis, and Sam Silver were also
members, but I m not sure of some. But Harmer Davis, Schade,
Parker, and myself, those I m sure of. We went down. As is my
technique, I try to organize my thoughts ahead of time. What I
do is take something about the size of that cassette over there--
a cardand I just jot down words that are key words that I want
to emphasize in the presentation.

Iwas, of course, the youngest person there. Schade, with

his great career during the war and "work here; Harmer Davis and
Parker. They were the giants. We went down there. We got into
the office, and Ed--

Swent : You said "down there." Where was the office?

Maslach: The office was in Dwinelle Hall. Ed Strong was a tall, strong
man--no pun intended. Rugged, lanky, Scandinavian type, if I
could put it--big, bushy head of hair and so on. I knew him from
the Faculty Club and also some committee activities in the
Academic Senate. We sat down, and he in his way--he started
lighting his pipe and said, "Okay, you called the meeting."
[chuckles]

That was the greatest example [chuckles] of one person

trying to outwait the other. So Harmer took the lead. He just
gave an overall view of the moment, how we were really,
basically, without leadership; and what we needed was to get
something quickly. And someone from the outside would mean
months to learn the ropes inside. I think Earl Parker talked
much more about the fact that we were trying to do all of these
things, and we needed to get these activities moving with the
signature of the dean in order to move the things to the
chancellor and so on--in terms of new buildings. He spoke a lot
in terms of the building and renovations and so on.

Incidentally, he also died not too long ago.

Swent : Yes.

Maslach: Very sad. But Pat Schade was just a quiet person. He didn t say
anything, really. And so people turned to me. These previous
statements had been rather short. I think I got my emotion up.
 255

What I was doing was I was telling Ed what a jewel he had in the
College of Engineering, how good it was, that there was so much
leadership and so many people. I just made kind of an emotional
plea for the operation and the leadership in terms of all the
things we had done in the last few years, under John Whinnery and
O Brien, and all kinds of things were waitingwho is the new
dean going to be?

When I f inished--and
mine was the longest of the three
statementshe I have a copy of that?"
said, "May I looked at
him. I said, "--I
flipped my card, which was a three-by-five
"Ed,

card, and had four words on it. He says, d like to get that
"I

because I could use that information."

I said, ll go back and try to reconstruct it."

"I So 1 went
back and dictated what I thought I had said. We typed it up,
I
and the next day we sent it down to him.

The budget committee the ad hoc committee had come up with

a list of names of people that they thought would be suitable as
the dean of engineering. I didn t know about this being in the
works. I knew there was some process, but I didn t know how he,
Ed Strong, was getting his advice.

Much later I learned that people like Parker and others were
obviously on that list. In fact, I still think--! m pretty sure
that Parker was number one on that list [chuckles]. He kind of
fitted just what we needed. He had the dynamic energy, and he
was a researcher. He did a lot with graduate students. He was
certainly not in any political activity within the college. He
moved along as an independent in a small department so he had no
affiliations, I would say, in that regard political
affiliations .

Chancellor Strong Offers the Deanship and a Triple Mandate

Maslach: About, oh, a week or so later, I got a call from Ed Strong s

office. Akiko Owen was the secretary-office manager. Wonderful,
wonderful woman. I saw her not too long ago. It brought back a
lot of memories. She in her wonderful Asian fashion made me
aware that this was an important meeting. He really wants to
talk with me. I was actually dressed in casual clothing
[chuckles) in the research laboratory. You get dirty in that
wind tunnel.
 256

So I decided I would go home and have lunch at home and

called Doris and said I m coming home for lunch and I have to
change for a meeting with the chancellor. And so I changed
clothes, and I had slacks and sports coat and so on, and I went
down there. That was about three o clock in the afternoon. He
had a wonderful little office. He had two big chairs on one side
of a cocktail table, a low one. He would sit in one, and on the
other side was a loveseat or a Chesterfield, not a single chair
but where several people could sit.

I sat opposite him. He and I were pipe smokers. He had

this technique of always starting by quietly filling his pipe and
getting it ready. Would put the pressure on the other person
[chuckles) to say something. I wasn t aware of this technique
until later. I was just making small talk, talking about the
hearts game up at the Faculty Club, which he used to watch, and
play every once--rarely, but--his gatoe was bridge and, to a
lesser degree, cribbage.

So we were friends beyond the usual academic relationship of

two professors. He just came right out after puffing a big
cloud of smoke, he came right out and said, want you to be the
"I

dean of engineering." I must say, in all honesty today, I did

not expect him to say that. In no way did I ever expect to be
offered the deanship. I was not a chair of the department. I
was not the director of an organized research unit. I was

operating the organized research unit known as Office of Research

Services. I was doing my research; I was doing my teaching. I
had all these activities.

Well, after that bombshell kind of technique, immediately I

said, "Well, you know, you ve got my material."

He said, He said, "Basically, what we want to do is

"Yes."

for the College of Engineering to finish this reorganization and

get moving." I m leaving out a lot here because I can t remember
the details he gave to me, but the important thing was summed up
at the very end, in which he said, "There are three things I want
you to do:

"Number one: Reorganize the bachelor s degre.e for

engineering, which is an abominationit s a four-and-a-half-year

degree. You require those poor students to take four-and-a-half -
years work, and you give them a four-year degree. Get it in
line with the Academic Senate requirements for a four-year
degree."

To put that in perspective, basically, you have so many

units each semester. Four years comprises so many units in
 257

total. We were just asking for more units of work to be done

than four years work should be. He was right. It turned out--
the proof of it was that most of our students stayed for four and
a half and five years before getting the degree. That was the
first thing: to have a true four-year degree.

The second thing was--"What we want is to have the finest

college of engineering in the United States. We want to be
number one." I didn t recognize what importance that was to him
and what he meant by it, actually. I had known that we were

quite good, but I never knew about number one, number two, and so
on. And so 1 nodded my head.

And the third thing that he wanted me to do was to get the

College of Engineering involved in the Academic Senate. I told

you that at one point I heard Mike O Brien saying he used to

ignore the Senate. And here the chancellor was giving me the
other side of the story. If I may dwell on this for a moment, I
immediately got to work on this because it was fairly easy to do.
By the time I left the deanship and became provost, the majority
of all the committees in the Academic Senate were chaired by
engineers .

When I was provost, [Chancellor Al] Bowker was asking, "Who

should we have on the special committees?" He said, "How about
the chairs of the Academic Senate?"

Rod Park, who was the provost for L&S, said, "No, we can t
do that."

Al said, "Why not?"

And [chuckles] Park said, "Because all the chairs are in

engineering." [laughs] It was true. That kind of a committee
would not have worked; it did not represent the entire campus.

Sowas quite successful in getting the College of

I
Engineering to move into the Academic Senate. I spoke to it at
length in time, and I proposed people. I learned how the

operation worked. I learned about the committee on committees.

I learned how to make recommendations. I did all these things.
Part of the process I knew, but part of it I didn t know until I
had to use it.

The main problem, of course, was to make the College of

Engineering number one in the United States. That was a real
job.

Swent :
Quite a mandate.
 258

Maslach: I have to remind you, when I became dean, 63, what was happening
nationwide: They were having elections in 64. Remember all
these dates?

Swent : I do.

Maslach: Do you remember the Free Speech Movement?

Swent: Absolutely.

Maslach: The sixties. All these things were real problems.

Swent: Sixty-three was when Kennedy was assassinated.

Maslach: Sixty-three, that s right. But the point was here: I didn t
realize when I became dean how I would immediately be involved in
a whole new level of activity, which^is campus-wide. The Free
Speech Movement did that, in large part.

Changing to a Quarter System: Problem with a Silver Lining

Maslach: Another thing that was happening, which nobody remembers: We went
on campus from a semester system to a quarter system. This was a
proposal by Clark Kerr as president. Basically, the concept was
to make greater use of the campus s physical facilities by having
a true four-quarter system so that there would be courses taught
all year round. We would not have to build as many buildings
and new campuses if this was true.

The concept had a lot of merit. Don t dismiss it quickly.

But to move from a semester system to a quarter system was a
massive undertaking. Fortunately, it was a wonderful problem
which had a silver lining. We had to reorganize the curriculum.
Guess what? The undergraduate curriculum was reorganized. As
dean, one of the things I said was there has to be a true four-
year curriculum. In the transformation from semester to quarter,
I solved one of the demands that Ed Strong gave me.

But what happened basically was this enormous load of

external work. You were now a member of the Chancellor s
coordinating council. They had problems, major problems. And I
was sitting right in the middle of the whole thing.

Swent: What were their problems?

 259

Making the Major Decision

Maslach: I want to save that for a moment and just kind of say what
happened and how I reacted to this offer of being the dean, and
the familywhat their reaction was and my friends. And people
like John Whinnery, who heard about it immediately, of course.

I discussed the whole thing with Doris that evening. I said

I was just absolutely flabbergasted. I did not say yes to Ed

Strong at that first meeting. I said, want to think about

"I

it." We discussed it at home. Talked with the kids, even. They

didn t know what a dean was, maybe, but they knew that it was a
big step up and stuff like that. We just had a lot of good
discussion on it.

The next morning was, I think, a Saturday. I said, m

"I

just going to go out and drive and go to the boat and think." I

just suddenly, by myself, drove over to Marin County. I was just

driving. I had this little Mercedes sports sedan, a nice car to
drive. And I would be thinking and driving and thinking and
driving. I ended up halfway that was almost like Sea Ranch or
something. When I finally found out what time it was, I started
thinking about going back. So I drove probably a total of five
or six hours. Had lunch and so on. Thought about everything.

It was a major decision in my life, ranking right up with

going to MIT during the war. But it was in certain respects
bigger because I could not see myself doing the job without
giving something up. This is a problem because while it is very
easy and facile to talk about the educator-administrator, it s
entirely different to do it and maintain your academic career.

Clark Kerr, of course, when he became president, never did

any more research. Ed Strong did not when he became chancellor.
You can see it today. This is one of the reasons people don t
like to take these jobs because, as Clark Kerr says, the finest
job in academia is a full professor at Berkeley

Maslach: Clark Kerr said in a statement one time it was a national

speech. He said that the finest position in academia was to be a
full professor at Berkeley, with no administrative duties. That,
of course, is very true. If you are a true academic, you have
your graduate students, you have your coursework, you have your
research activities and you work in the Academic Senate-
administration from an academic side but you don t have those
problems of the budget, those dollar signs, or personnel problems
 260

of what should we do here and there, or development of space.

You have to get out of yc.ur own sphere and move into another
sphere, and learn about it. And so you really have to make a
major, major change in this regard.

Amongst the changes that I made, for example, was I gave up

competitive yachting. I no longer raced with one of the greatest
boats in the United States on San Francisco Bay. Denny Jordan
was the skipper-owner of the Bolero, which in U.S. yachting
history, is one of the famous yachts. We had won championships
for years in a row. Or the Volante, that I used to sail on with
Doc O Brien. No more of this big sailing stuff, out of the St.
Francis Yacht Club, with all of the tension and competitive
spirit and all of the social activities that went with it,
including heavy drinking after the race [chuckles]. So this is
one of the things I gave up.

What I did not realize I would have to give up was teaching

and research, because the problems were much, much larger than I
ever anticipated. But I tried for a year to teach a course, and
that was impossible. It was a major course, which was wrong, to
think 1 could teach it and be dean as well. The time schedule of
the course you re there at a given hour.
1
You have to be there;
the students are there. The time schedule of a dean--there s a
crisis every minute. So you cannot juggle those kinds of
schedules .

I kept up on my research and graduate students for a while,

but even that started to drift off. This was my big mistake
because I should have hung on to graduate students and research
in some way. Later deans Ernie Kuh and others showed me what
they did, how to do this. I just was not smart enough at that
time to maintain research activity and dean s activity.

So I gave up things that later I really missed because I did

like teaching. I m a gregarious type, and I just liked to meet
with students. So I learned about my deanship. After the end of
the semester, John Whinnery was on his way out the door. I mean,
he was gone.

A Month Spent Reading Faculty Files

Swent : Was there no transition period?

Maslach: Well, I think being on the Dean s Coordinating Advisory Council

was sufficient transition. When you think about it, being on
 261

that college budget committee with Sam Silver was a good

transition. But I knew nothing, absolutely nothing about the
budgetary side. I knew very little about what we had, really, in
our faculty. So every weekend Saturdays and Sundays--! would go
down and would read the files. We had at that time 150 regular
academic faculty. A file on each one can take hours to read. I
didn t want to take files off campus. These were in locked file
cabinets. So I would just go down there and study these things.
1 learned about the faculty. I learned what I had, in other
words.

Swent : That s a lot of hours.

Maslach: Yes. There was a lot of disparity. As I told you earlier, there
was an undergraduate faculty and a graduate faculty, which today
you have on this campus. But at that time we didn t talk in
those terms. People taught undergraduate and graduate courses.
So I could see one major thing, and this was from my background
with the budget committee of the college: the cases were poorly
presented, one. Two, they were not uniform. A case from
electrical engineering or civil engineering was better than
mechanical and better than nuclear and better than industrial.

Swent: Now, when you say a case," you mean a case for faculty
advancement?

Maslach: Advancement or appointment, Anything. Advancement or

appointment .

Swent : You re not talking about research programs, just people?

Maslach: People. But, you see, the case requires you to talk about their
teaching, talk about their research, graduate students, and so
on. So you make the case. And we had yet to come really to
grips as a college with what was important in making a case, what
the importance of the graduate activity was compared to
undergraduate. This was still not in the minds of people.

This non-uniformity struck me right away. The cases were

filled with all kinds of little personal notes and little
backstabbing comments and so on. I remember one, which I thought
was hilarious, this older man- -engineering professorsent a note
to the dean on a little scrap of yellow paper, saying, just "I

heard that Professor So-and-so in this department, on sabbatical

leave, wrote a textbook. I don t think this meets the

requirements of sabbatical leave." Well, a professional --one of

the things you do is look at your activity, look at your field,
and if you see there s a need for a textbook, look at what you
 262

know and what you have, and what your lectures are, and make your
own textbook.

One of the best examples was in chemistry. A man I greatly

admired would give his lectures, and then take those lectures and
build it into a book. He did it in a very efficient way, using a
tape recorder. Amazing. A best-selling book, incidentally, in
chemistry, for many, many years.

So I found all this junk in these files. I m sure I

violated all kinds of laws and rules and regulations. I d read
some of this stuff, and I d take it and throw it in the
wastebasket [chuckles]. They were just nonsensical personal
bias. I spent that month, a lot of the time, transiting from
being a faculty member to a dean. What I did was, I was doing
research during the summer, which is my most active research
period, and I was doing this night work, and I was doing this
weekend work. I was really working seven days a week, eight
hours or more a day.

That month is what really got me going. I realized that my

style was entirely different from Mike s style. And Mike s style
was entirely different, probably, from John s. I was much closer
to John and wanted to go further in my administrative style.

Let take a minute to remember that when I graduated from

s
the University of California, I went to MIT, and within a matter
of months I was heading up projects. Obviously, I had some
administrative ability, even at that point. I told you that at
some point around seventeen, eighteen I made a decision that my
life would consist essentially of ten-year periods where I would
make changes, move into new areas. Which I have been doing.

Now I was going into a new area. And so I kind of sat down
in that office and thought through a lot of these things in terms
of administration with personnel and budget matters, and then I
needed a lot of help, a lot of strength in that area. Remember,
the deanship with John and Mike was the dean and Frances
Woertendyke in the dean s office, and that s all.

You go up to the dean s office today, and you ll be trampled

to death by the number of people that are up there in that
administration. It s just a very large administration. I m not

going to argue what is right or wrong because I increased the

amount of administration, right at that point. Sitting there,
reading those files, I realized what I had to do.

One Monday morning, I came in. I had a meeting with

Frances. She had a stack of files right there on the desk. I
 263

told her that I had come to the conclusion that academic

personnel hiring and advancing of faculty was the most important
job for me to do, and I was going to take over right now, and
here are my ideas. Basically, you have a ladder system within
the University of California. You have assistant professors,
step one, two, three, four. And associate professors one, two,
three. And you have to be promoted, at which point you get
tenure when you go from assistant to associate. Or you re
appointed as associate professor with tenure, or full professor.
And then the professor goes up a number of steps and then goes
over scale. Not many people were over scale at that point.

I just said, ve been on a lot of ad hoc committees and I

"I

know what cases should look like, and I m going to get working on
this end of it. I m going to start with"--and I picked up a pile
of files that were there, and I took them into the other office.
Now, I was told by Frances that she had ordered for me an
approval stamp. I said, It had your signature, and then
"What?"

approve" underneath, printed.

"I A rubber stamp. I had seen it
before with Mike s name, but I hadn t seen it with John s name,
but John used it.

I said, think I m going to do things differently." I

"I

still have that stamp at home [chuckles). I never used it. I

later found out from people down in the budget committee,
chancellor s office, that they hated that stamp. They hated that
stamp.

Swent :
Why?

Maslach: To them, it showed that the dean just wasn t paying attention or
doing anything. What they expected from a dean was what they
expected from all those other deans. Those other deans wrote
one-or two-page memos about the person. So here Mike O Brien was
saying about a person up for promotion, approve." That s all
"I

he said. So I figured it out pretty quickly. I went to that

office, and I started dictating. I was blessed all my life with
good secretaries. I had two, Marilyn [last name] and Lynn
Davidson. Lynn still, I think, is here on campus. She might
have retired. Marilyn left while I was dean, but after several
years. Marilyn was my inside secretary to take memos and stuff
like that.

Lynn was my secretary for external affairs, kept my

calendar, did all my personal correspondence, and my outside
correspondence. So they were in the front office, and they were
my two stalwarts. Marilyn was an outstanding secretary. She
would always come in with about a half a dozen of these pencils
which were all sharpened to a fine point, and she would take
 264

dictation very rapidly and transcribe it very rapidly. Just a

wonderful, wonderful person. And had a wonderful personality.

Swent: And Frances Woertendyke?

Maslach: She was senior administrative assistant. She had an office in

the back, and she ran the office, but she never took dictation.
So I got started. Actually, it was before July 1, but I knew
that the worst thing was happening: Every one of those cases that
I was going to write a memo on would go down to the chancellor s
office; the budget committee would get it, and they were tired
after their year of work, and they would have to find ten ad hoc
committees to talk about engineering professors. Well, those ad
hoc committees were already doing their research, and they were
not supposed to be doing this sort of stuff during these summer
months, and they would come in with a chip on their shoulder.
And guess why we were only getting 35^ percent of our cases
approved? There were just two strikes against us because we were
not following good procedures.

The calendar calls for cases for full professors to be in

the chancellor s office in January, associate professors in
February, assistant professors in March. And this was July.
Everything was wrong. So I really went to work. I read those
files, and I realized how non-uniform they were. I did my best
by doing a summary memo and sending them down, signed. No stamp.
I dictated about ten memos that day, and Frances was quite
surprised. I said, "Frances, send the files from the committee

directly to me. I ll take care of them." Because this was my

number one job.

Learning How a College Operates

Maslach: I pursued that during that summer by going over to the College of
Chemistry, which I knew had a good system, put out good cases,
and asked an associate dean that 1 knew well how they did it.
Well, he didn t know exactly because he was associate dean of
student affairs, so I went and met with the dean of chemistry at
that time, and I just learned from them how they operated as a
college, and how they prepared memos and what the department of
chemistry s responsibility was and what the dean s responsibility
was .

Swent: It was the College of Chemistry?

 265

Maslach: College of Chemistry, which is an anomaly, really. I could go on

and write a book about it, but basically, Dean Lewis many years
ago, knew that to have power, like Mike Brien--he was long
before Brien--you have to be dean as well as department
chairman, so he was dean and chairman. There was only one
department of chemistry. Later they put in chemical engineering
as a department, to keep us from developing chemical engineering,
in many respects. It s not quite true. They started chemical
engineering before we did. Mike O Brien tried to start process
engineering and take chemical engineering into engineering. It
didn t work.

But old man Lewis, dean for many years there in chemistry-
he knew essentially what he was doing. So the side line here:
The three people who were mainly responsible for the development
of this campus as a science-oriented, famous campus were Lewis
from chemistry, and physics--Birge from physics.

Swent : Evans?

Maslach: No, Evans was the mathematician. Basically, Lewis came first,
and he brought Evans and he brought Birge. Those three men were
the men who really operated this place. They operated the Senate
side.

They were all deans or chairmen, and they operated the

Academic Senate side, perfectly. They knew how to develop
curriculums, how to get things passed in the Senate and so on,
and then of course, through--boy I m getting a block on names
,

today Robert Gordon Sproul, they got their money, and an

intermediary between the deans and Sproul, who was president
during those periods, was the provost, Monroe Deutsch. So for
more academic problems, they went through Deutsch and developed
the campus.

Anyway, I went to these people and learned. I just

literally sat at their feet and just learned how a college
operates, what a department does, and so on. I remember the man
in chemistry reached over. He said, you know this?" It was
"Do

the academic personnel manual, a little black book, about two

inches thick. I never saw it before [chuckles]. So I got
acquainted with all of these details: how the college and how the
campus operates. I never knew any of these things.

I got a lot of good tips from chemistry, and I went to the

budget committee chairman. I knew him. And I just sat down and
talked with him and learned how the budget committee operates:
how they get ad hoc committees. I had been on ad hoc committees,
 266

but all I remembered was a memo from the chancellor, appointing

me to those. So I learned how they were appointed.

So I got moving on the academic personnel side very fast.

During that first semester or so, a colleague of mine back at
MIT, by the name of Goudsmit, a famous physicist, had become head
of the American Physical Society, and he put out a manual on how
to prepare papers for The Physics Review and all the other
Physical Society publications, magazines. It was a very cute
technique. He basically wrote all his advice in the form of a
paper. Here was the title, and here was the abstract. He told
what he was going to do. And then the introduction. He
introduced the problem, and he went on, as though he was
describing an experiment and this equipment and all this, and he
made these measurements and what have you. Well, instead, what
you did is you did this if you did that in order to meet the
requirements of this publication and-the review process and
everything. And then he bound it, as he would bind one of his
publications. And he sent it out.

Writing a Manual for Case Preparation

Maslach: I got a copy of it, and I said, "Man, this is a wonderful idea."
So I copied it, and I wrote, "How to Prepare a Case for
Appointment, Advancement, and Promotion." And I just did the
same thing. An abstract, and then I went through the
introduction, gave the whole process of how it goes through the
systemdepartments, to the campus and so on. I did the whole
thing. I thought that was very creative, it should have been
listed as one of my publications because it made a major, major
change .

The department chairmen who were brand new--no history of

the department beforenow knew what they were supposed to do in
presenting a case. I had, of course, my Coordinating Advisory
Committee, the same wayall chairmen, all deans--! mean,
assistant deans and all directors of organized research
institutions. And so we started moving.

This I think was the major first thing that I did in the
college. I realized that I actually had disorganized this report
because there was one big thing that happened while John Whinnery
was dean, and I was heavily involved in it. In order to prepare
ourselves for a new dean and also help prepare ourselves to be
organized and do all these things, John appointed four
committees, who would just study curricular problems, study
 267

graduate ed problems, research problems, space problems things

like this.

I was riding herd on them. I was sort of the super-chairman

of these four committees. I remember Banner Davis was the head
of one of them, and Earl Parker was head of another. I ve
forgotten who the others might have been. We decided to do
something a little different. I give Harmer Davis a lot of
credit here because he was a very social type, very knowledgeable
about how to give a party and stuff like that. We had these
committees of faculty within the college, working and coming up
with recommendations of what the college should do, okay?

This was the first time grassroots-type-activity was done.

I must say that I was in part responsible, with John Whinnery,
for this because I didn t foresee being dean but 1 did foresee
that these were some of the problems.

Swent : Did these committees correspond with the divisions or

departments?

Maslach: We talked about that. No, we plucked people from everywhere. We

stayed away from all of the minor divisions. We just took people
for their ability to come up with ideas.

So anyway, we got these four committees going, and they were

actually going during the time we were on pins and needles,
waiting for an announcement of a new dean. This was something we
were going to give to the new dean. Well, I think maybe that is
one of the reasons I became dean, now that I think about it,
because I had that previous experience of getting the grassroots
stuff. That s why I was so eloquent when I spoke to Strong,
because I had a background of what these four committees were
doing.

The Retreat at Granlibakken, December 1963

Maslach: We ended up--and this was my idea--we ended up that we were going
to have a presentation of this material to the dean. It was now,
like, December! What I did was, I organized a party. We took
the entire faculty in buses, Greyhound buses, which were
chartered, and we went to Granlibakken, a little resort off Lake
Tahoe, up in the Sierras. We had the entire place to ourselves,
okay?

Swent: What we call a retreat now.

 268

Maslach: A retreat, our first retreat. I organized it, etc. At this

point, I was dean. So anyway, it was one of the greatest ideas I
had. I got rid of the buses. I sent them off to Tahoe. We were
there in the snow, at the end of the road, away from Tahoe--main
road, 89. Nobody had any wheels, so there was no way to go
gambling or anything. We were just going to be there, and we
were going to work.

Swent : This was 150 faculty members?

Maslach: Yes. And we just had fun. Each of the committees met and
prepared their presentation and so on. And so the presentations
were made to the entire faculty, and the recommendations were
made by the committees, and the recommendations were voted on by
the entire faculty.

Swent: Right there.

Maslach: Right there. We went three or four days on this, and we just had
a wonderful time. Great food, lots of food. And I found that
the dean had a little money, very little, and I just essentially
set up a bar. I was in charge of the bar. Of course, the people
there who ran the bar poured the drinks, but we had good wines
and beer, and we had a happy hour.

So ended up with thirty recommendations of what to do.

I
These were grassroots recommendations.

Swent: I m sorry. I m confused. I thought these four committees had

been set up by Whinnery.

Maslach: During Whinnery s tenure.

Swent: And you were--

Maslach: And they did their work, and then he left, and the committees did
not report until the next semester.

Swent: I see. Okay.

Maslach: Every committee dies in the summer [chuckles], okay? So I got

all these committee reports and all these things. I m sitting

right up there, and I m chairing the whole goddamn thing. It was

fun. It was real fun. Everybody spoke; everybody said what they
wanted; everybody did this and that. It was a great timing. I
did not have any premeditation that this would be as powerful as
it was .
 269

One thingthat s when we became a college. That meeting in

Granlibakken was when we everybody met everybody else--I was
introducing people from civil engineering to people in electrical
engineering. They didn t even know each other. So this was the
time when we really got to know each other. It was just night
after night. The last night of the retreat, I repented, or
relented, I should say. I brought the buses in, and everybody
went off to--I forgot where we went. One of the big casinos.
South Shore? No. We had it at the north shore. They had that
casino right there, something state, casino. Frank Sinatra took
it over years afterwards. But we went out and had a night at the
casino. People got to playing the slot machines and so on.

The next morning, we all got up, and we divided up the

buses. Some people wanted to go straight home. Other people had
brought up their skiing equipment, and we had a day of skiing, on
the college [chuckles]. So we really had a fun week. Actually,
it was about five days. 1 still remember it. I still remember
all the time together.

It was so deep in snow, those buses barely got in there. We

had to walk in for a hundred yards or so with our luggage and
were assigned rooms. We took over the whole place. It was just
wonderful. I wanted to give you that, but I want to get back
because the thought occurred to me that my having so much
knowledge about the college helped Ed Strong make up his mind on
the deanship.
 270

VIII DEAN OF THE COLLEGE OF ENGINEERING, 1963 TO 1972

[Interview 7: February 4, 1999] ##

1963, a Critical Year in Rarefied Gas Dynamics

Swent : We had just begun your deanship last time, talking about it.

Maslach: Well, since I last saw you, I had a lot of thoughts about what
happened during that period. I must say that, while I cannot
describe it as being disorganized thinking, I realized that so
many aspects of my career were thrust upon me and could not
normally be considered part of a deanship. You have to put this
in the context of history of that time. We re thirty-five years
along, and we re beginning to get some perspective.

But in 1963, [President John F.) Kennedy was killed. In

1964, the Republicans held their political convention in San
Francisco, which was an important element of the beginning of the
Free Speech Movement on the Berkeley campus. And all kinds of
other things were happening internationally in terms of my field
of research; namely, upper atmosphere aerodynamics. The day of
Sputnik was over but we now had the promise from Kennedy that we
would put a man on the moon. Of course, since we were the
largest single research group doing rarified gas dynamics, we
were under stress or at least demand.

I felt that it would be necessary for me to kind of talk

about a given element of the deanship and progress to a certain
point, and then it might not be quite chronologically correct,
but then go back and pick up another theme and follow it to its
kind of logical kind of semi-conclusion.

Swent: I wonder if I could interrupt just a second to point out that

there s a conference this weekend, the California Studies
conference, a big statewide conference. A big element in that is
the Free Speech Movement, which is now looked back on as one of
the pivotal events of California history.
 271

Maslach: Yes. It was quite a time, I ll tell you [chuckles]. To start

with, I think you ought to take first the basic changes that were
carried out in engineering alone, as part of the deanship. This
was extraordinarily important and, of course, is the central
theme of doing this oral history. As I told you last time, I
started looking at files and so on the summer before I actually
took over on July 1.

Frances Woertendyke Eberhart and Administrative Changes

Maslach: I also had long conversations with Frances Woertendyke at that

time and knew that she was looking forward to something
different. She had been in the College of Engineering for a long
time and in the dean s office for a long time. She was aching to
move.

This actually fit in my plans because in certain respects

Frances and I have different styles of administration. I tend to
be the gung-ho type moving quickly and taking on responsibilities
and doing quite a bit of my own work within the office. Hers was
a different form, in which for years things went through her
simply because Mike O Brien had been on half-time leave all that
time.

She and I evolved a plan which was that she should go to

"systemwide" [the university system office] because over the
years she had been heavily involved in two major systemwide
activities. One is the Engineering Articulation Conferences and
then the other was the Engineering Liaison Committee, that
committee composed of senior officials of industry and
government, who met yearly to discuss the direction of
engineering statewide, not just Berkeley.

So there was a statewide function to be done in engineering,

and we explored that- -she, through her channels and I, through my
channels. She opted to take that job which was systemwide and
put her back into contact with a number of her friends who were
also in systemwide, including the secretary of the regents. I
used to go down there at systemwide, and at noontime I d always
see this group of four women enthusiastically playing bridge
while they were eating their lunch in the cafeteria on the lowest
floor of the systemwide office building [University Hall] .

She was very happy to move there and take over that
function.
 272

Swent : Where was that office then?

Maslach: There was no office, really, for engineering systemwide. It was

in essence created.

Swent: You were speaking about their playing bridge.

Maslach: They had a canteen.

Swent: In which building was it?

Maslach: Systemwide office building [University Hall] on Oxford and

University.

Swent: Okay.

Maslach: So we kept seeing each other because as dean of engineering at

Berkeley, I was, of course, on all of these different committees.
She and I would take trips and so on.

Also about this time I noticed that a professor Howard

Eberhart of civil engineering was often coming into the office
around six o clock, and walking out with Frances. They later
were married and moved down into the Santa Barbara area. Howard
continued to teach, actually, part time in Santa Barbara.
Eventually died, and Frances just recently passed away.

So that change in the organization of the college dean s

office forced me to look around for people that I needed because
there were obvious things that needed to be done. If you looked
at the primary things [that] were facing me: 1) faculty hiring
and improvement; 2) aiding in curricular development, although
most of that was done at the department level; 3) we were grossly
under our space quota, which was a formula, which I learned about
during this time, and we really needed more buildings, more space
if we were to carry out our new mandate, which was to move into
the graduate area, which takes more laboratory and space in
general, and then finally [4)1 get on top of the budget and learn
about money and things of that nature.

I advertised for the budget person, to do budget and space

work, and we first hired Bob Knox, who was a business
administration major and very active in recruiting in the
business administration field. He left us after a couple of
years and was replaced by David Brown, who has stayed on right
until retirement and is in fact doing recall work right now at
the College of Engineering.
 273

Rachael Stageberg, Administrative Assistant

Maslach: The second person that came in at the senior level was Mrs.
Rachael Stageberg. She was picked out by Frances Eberhart,
really. Frances knew the people in engineering, and she knew
this woman, who was an administrative assistant in electrical
engineering, working for chairman-then, Lotfi Zadeh. Of course,
electrical screams, but Mrs. Stageberg came to work for us in the
college .

I always recall the first time I saw her. I then had a

career with her for twenty years within the university. She came
in with Frances. We had a cocktail table in my office, round and
low, with three nice chairs. We sat down. She was perfectly
coifed, perfectly dressed, poised--just in command. There was no
question about it. I don t care how dominant Frances was she
was a large woman and in charge- -but "Rachael was a take-charge
type. You could tell it within five minutes, you know?

She sat down, and we started talking about the job and what
it entailed and what I could see in the future. Of course, this
was very interesting because Frances was listening to how her job
was being changed, basically. We went through the whole thing.
At the end, 1 asked her if she had any questions or any
conditions of employment. She said, "Yes, I have a couple of
conditions of employment." She had a great sense of humor, and
the first thing she said [was] "Don t ever ask me to lift
anything heavier than twenty pounds." [chuckles] She wanted to be
able to leave on Thursday afternoon an hour or so early in order
to have her hair done, and the last one was, "Don t anybody try
to make me give up smoking." She smoked two packs of cigarettes
a day- -not all the way down, but about halfway through. She made
it an artistic display, the way she smoked. In other words, it
was something to do with her hands more than it was the smoking.
We all agreed to that, so that was the end of it. The sad
feature is that I should have tried to get her to give up
smoking. She did about fifteen years ago. But she died actually
of a combination of Sydney-B flu, pneumonia, and emphysema, which
was of course a lung problem. She could not convert oxygen in
the air to oxygen in the blood. But she was a sprightly person.

Frances tended to be a woman who frowned a lot. Rachael was

a woman that laughed a lot, smiled a lot. So it was an entirely
different office arrangement.

Swent : Rachael was your administrative assistant.

 274

Maslach: Yes. She went on to higher titles. I ciid not have her the
entire time during deanship and provostship in my career, but she
did come back when I was in the chancellor s office. She went
also to systemwide, and she worked for one of the vice presidents
down there. She was involved in a lot of systemwide things.

David Brown, Director of Budget and Space Planning

Maslach: The humorous story about David Brown was he came over from the
personnel office, where he was working, and he was doing what we
call a desk audit. In other words, they look at what you do and
what you don t do in your job, to see if you were qualified or if
this job should be re-rated at a higher level, or even a lower
level. But he came over and did a desk audit on one of our
people, and he was so interesting to talk to. Amongst other
things, I found out that he had served in the Coast Guard in
fact, had just gotten out within the last year or so.

When he left, I told Rachael--! said, "Remember that guy s

address and phone number. He s a comer. He s someone we ought
to be thinking about." She agreed. A year or two later we hired
that guy, David Brown. In those days, we did not have to
advertise much. If we had people in mind, we could go ahead and
make offers. So that was the beginning, really, of the new
organization that really took in effect more in the fall, almost
December, before we had the people on board.

Learning from Working with Chancellor Ed Strong

Maslach: The Granlibakken thing, of course, was in the wintertime, when we

went skiing on the last day. But that whole period of those four
committees working togetherand I was sort of the major-domo
before I became dean. I was the chair of this group. We had
four subcommittees, headed up by people like Banner Davis and
Earl Parker, and Bill Jewell was in charge of oneyou know,
people of that stature, the top people in the college.

was getting my directions in the academic side from that

I
area, and I was spending a lot of time learning the job. I think
I already said that when I was appointed, Ed Strong gave me three
things to do: namely, become number one in the United States, and
to make our curriculum a true four-year curriculum (it was really
 275

a four-and-a-half year curriculum, for a bachelor s degree), and

then get people more active in the Academic Senate.

I would meet with Ed Strong every weeksometimes every

other week because we d have to cancel out--he especially. But
it was a very, very wonderful way to learn about the university
primarily and then secondarily what I should be doing in the
College of Engineering. He was a tall, rugged- looking person.
Big shock of hair and surprisinghe was a professor of
philosophy, which is considered quiet meditation and so on.

He actually was a very physically active person. During

World War II he went to work up at the Radiation Laboratory,
which many professors did, incidentally, during World War II,
because there were no students on campus. Here a professor of
philosophy was operating the great big crane which spanned the
large shop area. He was the man up t-here in that little cubicle
on the crane, and he would be dropping the hooks, whatever, to
pick up things and move them. It was a little odd [chuckles], a
professor of philosophy as a crane operator. But both sides of
him worked very well.

He was also very handy with his hands, and was sort of a
carpenter and cabinet maker. When I would goDoris and I would
go to his home, it was so wonderful to walk in and look at the
fabulous all-paneled living room-dining room area with absolutely
perfect cabinetry, which he he had done all of it. During World
War II, incidentally, they had had the lot, and then they
designed the building, during the time he just did it himself.
He was such a pleasure to work with and to talk with.

You have to remember that there was a very close

relationship of Clark Kerr and Ed Strong on the Berkeley campus.
I would put Clark as sort of the big-picture man, and Ed Strong
was very active in the Academic Senate and was the one that
carried out a lot of the Academic Senate regulations to support
things. Remember, amongst all of the things that were going to
go on in 63 and a few years thereafter, we had the expansion of
the university from essentially a one- or two-campus system into
a nine-campus system. This was turmoil right under our feet.

Meeting with Ed was always a pleasure going down to his

office and talk over various problems.

Swent : He was chancellor from 1961 to 65.

Maslach: Yes.

Swent: A couple of years.

 276

Maslach: There was a period with Martin Meyerso.i. And then after that was
Roger Heyns.

Swent: In 65.

Maslach: What do you have Heyns down for?

Swent: Sixty-five to 71.

Maslach: Well, actually, Martin Meyerson was in there.

Swent: January to July of 65.

Maslach: Yes. Okay.

Swent: So you had a couple of years with Chancellor Strong.

Maslach: Yes. But I had known him, of course, from the Faculty Club. He
was occasionally a hearts player, but most of the time he played
cribbage or bridge. I would see him and talk with him casually.

The Hearts Table at the Faculty Club

Swent: This was a categorization? You were a hearts player or a

cribbage player or a bridge player.

Maslach: That s right. The hearts players rarely, if ever, played bridge;
and the bridge players occasionally, but without enthusiasm,
might play hearts [chuckles]. Some of each would play cribbage.
Dominoes also was a big game.

Swent: This was at the Faculty Club.

Maslach: At the Faculty Club. It was rather interesting. I ll tell one

little story. Art Hutson, who was secretary of the Academic
Senate and an avid hearts player, professor of English, one time
just glanced around and noticed he said, "Gentlemen, we have
here a quorum of the executive committee of the Academic Senate."
He said, secretary, I would like to put before you a motion."
"As

[chuckles] And so a piece of business was accomplished while we

were all playing cards. Everyone said, Aye or No, and then the
motion was passed, and Arthur adjourned the meeting, and we went
on playing cards [chuckles]. I always thought that was rather
humorous .

Swent : Yes.
 277

Recruitment and Advancement of Faculty

Maslach: The first thing, of course, that I noticed was the big problem
that I always keep coming back to, which is of course for me the
number one problem of the College of Engineering, and that is the
recruitment and advancement of top faculty. I will now disclose
the mystery of the twenty-three positions which I found that were
still in the College of Engineering and were net being used. To
do this, I have to get into a little gobbledygook--namely the
,

jargon of the budget and talk in terms of FTE and FTE students
and FTE faculty. FTE mean full-time equivalent. This is
essentially a mechanism to account for the fact that a few
students are not full-time. Most of them are full-time, but a
few are taking less than full curriculum and not graduating in a
straight four years.

What you do is go through this lengthy arithmetic of number

of units in a course and how many students are in that course,
and then you start adding all this up. From this you end up with
a number of full-time equivalent students in the College of
Engineering, and that leads to another formula, which then goes
into the full-time equivalent faculty that you deserve.

Now, about 1960--just to make it a rough position the

University of California was being pushed into a less than
desirable condition in the budget. Up to about 1960, I kind of
put it like the retirement of Robert Gordon Sproul. It was a new
kind of university budget operation and budget relationship with
the legislature. The single best example is that you can look at
buildings on this campus which were designed and built when the
space formula was liberal and, now, buildings in which the space
formula is anything but liberal. You see buildings in which
offices are small cubicles, and the office, say, of chemistry,
would be a good example. A couple of their buildings were built
under the old formula, and now a couple are under the new formula.

Or go to the Hearst Mining Building and see those beautiful

paneled offices with the fireplaces and so on, right next to a
lecture hall where you re going to teach. Or the other
direction, your laboratory where you re going to do your
research. Well, we don t have that today. This was the
beginning of the slide in this regard.

At one point just to give just a general perspective the

number of students that you were talking about per faculty member
was, say, fifteen to use a rough number. Well, it got up to
sixteen, eighteen, twenty, and whereas state colleges were at the
twenty level and community colleges more at the twenty-five
 278

level, why, we were just being pushed slowly down that area by
the cutting back of the budget.

The first thing you did was count how many FTE faculty we
had. How many FTE students do we have? You start going through
these calculations. If you really want to increase the number of
faculty and we desperately wanted to at that timewe re going
into a new function. We needed graduate faculty. Today, for
example, you will notice on the campus we have graduate and
undergraduate faculty. We needed students, and we were not
getting them as rapidly as we thought we would at the graduate
level, recruiting from the entire nation. But it obviously was
the fact that we needed more students at the undergraduate level
in order to support the college that we were talking about.

Swent : This explosion of students, then, was at the undergraduate level,

still, in the sixties?

Maslach: No. In fact, as I will point out, in engineering, when I became

dean and for a few years thereafter, we did not have the
students. I had to go out and recruit students within the state
in order to build up the college size and to get the FTE. And
our graduate enrollment slowly increased as we got new faculty,
who would then attract graduate students, because it s really a
circular argument in this whole operation. You also needed space
in order to attract faculty. It s a chicken-and-egg proposition,
and you have to make progress on every front at the same time.

So anyway, I remember going through this, and I could see we

deserved a few more faculty, but I petitioned for this in my
first budget message, and I got them. Ed Strong was
extraordinarily useful, helpful in this regard, and very
sympathetic in this regard.

Swent: This petition, then, went directly to the chancellor?

Maslach: Well, everything goes to the chancellor s office. Within the

office, he has a budget office. The key man in that regard was
Errol Mauchlan. He s still around retired, of course. The key
man that I worked with was Frank Ketcham, and his staff, Oh,
there were Nancy Park and Anne Wright.

I started learning first from Frank what all these numbers

meant, what the formulas were. I ll just toss out some numbers,
and anybody that remembers these old formulas will laugh, but
thirty, twelve, and eight; and fifteen, fifteen, and four. These
were numbers that were in the formulas for allocation of faculty
and also in terms of the allocation of space. What they said to
a knowledgeable person was that a faculty member who is guiding
 279

graduate students and having graduate seminars, the number of

students in the seminar was, say, four, whereas upper division
would be twelve and lower division, thirty. That s simplifying
everything, but in general you get the idea.

And then space was on top of that. So if you had graduate

people, you would get more space. Undergraduate people, you
don t get more space. You get office space and, of course, you
have the classrooms, which are part of the campus. We do not
control the classrooms that much within the college.

So I had to learn all this thing. I was doing twelve- and

sixteen-hour days, and I am not exaggerating. You cannot believe
the pressures that were on at that time because all these other
things were happening- -FSM and so on. But to complete the
concept, we were able to change the college office to have a top
man on budget and space analysis, space development. And then we
had a top person, Rachael, in terms of personnel. Her base job
was non-academic personnel; in other words, the College of
Engineering has a lot of non-academic people, staff. We were
blessed, of course, with a very good environment. People loved
to work in Engineering because it was a straightforward job, and
there were no big egos. People stayed on.

Our problem was that most of our people were at the upper
levels, bouncing against the ceilings of their particular job
classification. So that s how I got into this with Rachael,
doing all of the groundwork, of course, and we were able to
change the jobs. The jobs were different. No one had done any
of this in the previous twenty years. So I was really a very
popular person with the staff. Still am. Many, many staff will
come up and talk to me all the time, even now.

"Finding" Twenty-Three New Faculty Positions

Maslach: This is the way the college was moving. The twenty-three
positions were in the college budget--! found them there one day,
and I asked Frances. I said, "What is this?" She said they re
positions for lecturers. Now, a lecturing position is a full-
time equivalent position, and a full-time equivalent position can
be used for lecturers or for ladder-rank faculty. Well, I found
that out for the first time. 1 had been a lecturer, and I had
been a full-time faculty with a professor title.

I said, "Why aren t we using these positions?" Well, things

had changed, and we used to use more of them with part-time
 280

lecturers that would be in for quarter-time, half-time, stuff

like that. A lecturer just teaches; doesn t do anything else,
but just a teaching function. I didn t realize that I had found
a gold mine. Here were twenty-three positions. We had working
about 153, to give you a rough number. How could I use those?
So then, of course, I talked to Frank Ketcham, and then I talked
to Ed Strong, and then I talked to other people. I started
distributing those positions, to be used as regular ladder-rank
positions.

The ladder goes from assistant professor, so many steps;

associate professor, so many steps. We have a true ladder system
in the University of California, as opposed to a phony ladder
system at, say, Harvard, where they really appoint only at tenure
level. They use the assistant professorship like an elevated
graduate student or post-doc [toral student], something like that.
So I started being Santa Claus, giving out positions, even before
the budget period had come. You don t get the results of the
budget period until months later. So that s where the twenty-
three positions were. Hidden. Not being used.

Recruiting Engineering Students at the Community Colleges

Maslach: Of course, that immediately gave me a problem. If I put out too

many of those positions, I cannot truly justify them in terms of
FTE student activity. So early on I realized that I had to do
something about recruiting students. I didn t know quite how to
do this. I started thinking about it in terms of recruitment at
the freshman level. That was just such an enormous process, and
I just didn t know how to do it.

Engineering was not popular. This campus, and engineering

in particular, got as many applications as were justified by the
budget, and no more, in the sixties and the seventies.

Swent : This must have been a change, then. Where did I see this figure
that when Mike O Brien was dean, they anticipated something like
2,400 students, and they got thousands more?

Maslach: The big burst was immediately after the war, when the returning
GIs--actually in the forties.
,

Swent: So they had actually caught up, then, with that.

Maslach: There was an infamous report put out by the Bureau of Labor
Statistics in about the--
 281

H
Swent: All right. You were just saying that there was an infamous
report that was put out.

Maslach: By the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the U.S. government, in

which they concluded that there would not be a big demand for
engineers in the next ten years, simply because of the fact that
there had been so many people who had come out of the military
who had partial engineering backgrounds the Sea Bees, for
example, was noted as an example of people who could get things
done, using baling wire. That report put a horrible damper on
engineering enrollments through the fifties and sixties.

The second thing you should note is that it was not until
[Albert] Bowker was chancellor and I m talking in the mid-
seventies--that we really had this enormous pressure put upon us
by enrollment pressures at the freshman level. Bowker came, and
he did an analysis. Of course, he s a top statistician. He just
pointed out to us in the seventies that up to that point we had
just almost fortuitously had enough applications of enough
qualified people that when they did actually come, it was
essentially holding us at our level.

It s amazing to me. Today we get thousands of qualified

applicants for engineering freshman positions. I m talking
thousands truly, on the order of four thousand. All of them have
4.0 grade point average in high school, and we can only take so
many hundred. It s just amazing, because in my day we were
looking for freshman students.

What I did was I came to the conclusion that the way to go

after new students was at the junior level. The University of
California, with its articulation agreement with the state
colleges and junior colleges, gave me the opportunity here. The
first year, I went and visited five or so community colleges.
Basically, I was giving a pitch to the faculty, the advisors and
some of these colleges have separate staff of advisors, who are
not teaching facultyand then, of course, administrators.

I was just pointing out that I had learnedfrom my looking

at all kinds of things in those first six months, a year that
half of our graduating seniors were from community colleges.
This was kind of a little-known fact.

Swent: That s a lot.

Maslach: That is a lot. In fact, that is a secret, really, of what is

happening budget-wise. In other words, we had very few lower-
 282

division courses and a lot of upper-division courses, and we had

these students coming in at the junior level. So we had a ripe
opportunity budgetarily to not have these big classes in the
lower division but to have a concentration at the upper division.

Swent : Did people transfer from the state colleges?

Maslach: No, they don t--still don t, and did not then. The reason is
that the state coll ;ge curriculum is so different in the final
two years that the transfer is very difficult, to get a degree.
Say you finished at junior level at a state college [and]
transfer to the senior level. A logical concept. It just
doesn t work out. The numbers are just down in the ones to tens,
whereas at the community college level, we had a rich
opportunity.

It was extremely difficult to kind of make the break into

the community college system. I had gone to all these
articulation committees and had been prominent--in fact, I had
chaired the committee for one year later on. Whinnery had been
very active with the articulation conference. He and a professor
at San Jose were responsible in large part for the details of the
common lower division and the first electrical engineering course
that was in that first common lower division. Whinnery wrote a
book, Fields, Waves and Circuits, and then the man at San Jose
also wrote a book. His name was Smith, as I recall.

These were two competing textbooks. They were similar and

yet quite different. They re still, as far as 1 know, in use
today. These were two very fine texts put out by two people at
the same time. But in certain ways, the two textswhen you look
at them, John s is far more global and theoretical and looking
forward, whereas the other was more of the technique of the how
to do things, rather than the why. Of course, San Jose, Silicon
Valley, and so on, there was an opportunity for them to have a
text of that nature.

So anyway, I went to the various community colleges. I

spoke, and I spoke with all the students. The first year, I was
learning. I think it s honest for me to say that the net result
of five trips to community colleges resulted in maybe one or two
more students coming from the community college [chuckles] the
next year. But then, by learning something, I suddenly realized
what was wrong. What was wrong was not the faculty or the
administration, not the students, but it was the advisors.

If you put yourself in the place of an advisor in a

community college and you have a student that s quite good, maybe
not the finest, you want to advise that student and in all good
 283

conscience--! tn not criticizing here at all--you would maybe opt

for the state college for that student. The universitywell,
their standards are higher, and everybody knows if your grade
point average drops immediately upon going into the University of
California, and this student is really not up to this and so on
and so on--so, okay, you advise the student to go to the state
college, upon completing an A. A. degree.

The problem, therefore, was to make contact with the

advisors and the students, sort of together. I tried all kinds
of different techniques. For example, in the beginning I would
just go to the place and talk with the advisors [chuckles], and
then I would talk with students and their advisors. The best
example of success was Diablo Valley [College], right across the
hills here. That was always a good feeder school for us, good
students, fair numbernot as large as the number that we get
from San Francisco, but pretty good.

And so would go over there, and I would say, "Look, I m

1
here. I happy to sit down and look at files of students and
d be
give you my opinion." When that offer was made, it was amazing
how many advisors took me up on it, right away. The one time I
remember I was over there, and I was over there starting about
two or three in the afternoon. I was kicked out with the advisor
and some students [chuckles] at ten o clock at night. I didn t
have dinner, and I was looking at transcripts the entire time.
Students were lined up outside the hallway as far as you could
see [laughs], sitting on the floor, waiting. I was judging each
one. And that was a turning point because I was able to convince
the advisors that they had a good product.

Suddenly, I got a brilliant ideaand this was my best

change in this whole recruiting scheme. It was about 65. I
noticed from the kinds of questions I was getting from students
and advisors that they could be best answered by my students,
here at Berkeley. So I went to Vi Lane in the undergraduate
office. I said, "Vi, I need a list of names of students," and 1
told her what I was doing. I said, next three community
"My

colleges are X, Y and Z. Give me the names of good students who

have done well, a student who could get up and say, Look, I ve
got a better than three point average. I came from this
community college, and I know half of you people out there in the
audience, and you can do just as well as I did.
"

That s what I did. I would go to these community colleges

with a student. I would always make a deal out of it. We would
have lunch on the way, and we d meet the president of the
community college [chuckles]. He d meet some of his old faculty
members. And then we would go out in the auditorium. I would do
 284

the introduction and give the broad picture of the university and
what we were doing and why we were interested in coming here,
because we got good students in here, and we re kind of surprised
we re not getting more.

want to introduce somebody in the flesh here, somebody

"I

you all know, or should know. He graduated here and here s what
he s doing. He s enrolled in this and doing this, doing that.
He can tell you his grade point average. That s privileged
1

information, you know. So we got the students in; I didn t

answer a single question from then on. Every question during
that visit was directed to the student. And they were really
good questions. Questions they wouldn t ask. me, they d ask the
student .

We d get together with a bunch of kids, all talking. It

worked like a charm. Well, I was extraordinarily successful in
this. Today, of course, there are over a hundred community
colleges. Not all of them have engineering lower division, but a
lot of them do.

Swent : Didn t you also influence the curriculum at the community

colleges?

Maslach: Well, that s the common lower division I keep referring to, which
was the function of the articulation committee, which was to make
it easy to transfer.

Swent: Make it possible.

Maslach: Yes, make it possible.

Swent: But I have a note here that says that you--

Maslach: I did more, yes.

Swent: --worked hard to get what? an E-54? at the time?

Maslach: Well, I did a couple of things, and I ll bring it up. It flows

out of this, the community college thing.

Swent: All right.

Maslach: The concept of taking a student along just worked famously. And
then, at the same time, I found out, working with Vi Lane, that
we had records of every undergraduate student who graduatedwho
came in, what happened to them, and when they graduated (if they
did), and what they did thereafter. So we had a continuous
record of all these people.
 285

An Important Report on Articulation of Community Colleges

Maslach: I spent weekends and nights down there [chuckles]. Vi Lane would
only entrust so many files to me at a time. But I started
elaborating on all this work, and I had lots of numbers. I wrote
a report, which showed that in Engineering Berkeley, counting
every student that we ever had from a given date, how many were
home-grown freshmen, four-year people at Berkeley, and how many
came in at different levels. A few came in at the sophomore
level. Most came in at the junior level. Very few came in at
the end of the junior year. And then what happened to those
students .

As I said, 50 percent of the graduating student body

eventually were going on for graduate work. Not at the
beginning, when I first started, but .eventually this was true.
And of that 50 percent, 50 percent were from community colleges.
You could not tell a grade-point difference between a community
college transfer and a UC four-year student if--and this is the
big if--that student from the community college was qualified to
come in as a f reshman--for example, academically qualified. By
that I mean people who could have gone to the university but
opted for the community college, usually to save money, but under
that proviso, that was the way it went.

Now, people who had curricula deficiencies which they went

to the community college to make upthey did not have math or
enough math, or they didn t have this or that in high school--
those students did not do as well. So I was pointing this out to
the advisors. "Look, here s a record of how well your students
do--so you can calibrate in terms of your students." That is, of
course, the message I gave.

That report received very, very wide circulation, not only

within the state of California but across the nation because the
community college concept was primarily in California, Michigan,
in Texas, later Florida. But then it became increased enormously
because it was a way to get a higher education for the first two
years for a large number of people, without great costs.

Swent: Excuse me. Did this report have a name?

Maslach: Oh, I m sure it had a title. I could find a copy, maybe someday.

Swent: When was it?

Maslach: Oh, it was about 66, after two or three years in the deanship.
 286

Swent: You said it circulated widely.

Maslach: Oh, it made me an expert on the community college system. What

really it made me an expert on--and I still give talks on this
internationallyis the California system, which is the three-
point system of the university, the state colleges, and the
community college. The concept is articulation as the key word,
the transfer function. I have given numerous seminars. Went to
Saudi Arabia numerous times to influence this upon their
thinking. It s only recently that they have started community
colleges, but I first went there in 73. I met Crown Prince Fahd
and others. He still remembers today that I talked about
community colleges.

They use them a little differently than we do, but the

concept of articulation is still exactly the same as we do. So
I m a great proponent of the California system. I tried to
influence France in this regard because I was a consultant for
France for a while. They re so entrenched in their system,
nothing will ever blast them out of that, never. But Germany has
adopted parts of the system. The California system is looked
upon with great favor.

One time late in my deanship, I had a delegation of New York

legislators come and visit me because of this articulation
concept, which they had gotten wind of. You have to remember,
New York state didn t build universities, even, until after the
war. So they built community colleges. They found out this was
the secret, and they did it.

My legacy with community colleges goes on and on [chuckles].

I am today, I think, still the only University of California
person who received the community college award, which they give
yearly to the outstanding graduate, former graduate. It was at
an articulation conference in Sacramento. A thousand people
there. But I got this award. Of course, the introduction was on
all this report, and how I proved community college students
could make it so well.

Swent: Did you do any similar analysis on graduate work?

Maslach: Oh, yes, and I will get to that a little later, at a further
stage. We in engineering know exactly what happened to every
graduate student, from the day they arrived to the day they left
--when they got a degree, what they did, where they went, and so
on. We have just the same background- -of course, you cannot use
a lot of this data too easily because you cannot identify people.
You can only talk in gross numbers and percentages. It s only
those kids that I took with me to the community colleges that
 287

were known. They voluntarily agreed to do this. So that worked

out quite well.

Whereas in the first year I said maybe one or two students

came, more came from the community colleges, and the second year
I think about ten more, and then the third year, about twenty
more, and on cumulativelyso that we really built up an upper
division very quickly, even while our lower division was not
moving that quickly because of the national feeling about
engineering, not a good career choice, because we had more
engineers than we knew what to do with, which was of course a big
lie because the returning GIs--all those Sea Bees and so onwhat
they did is they went to work doing construction. That was a
horrible report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics department.
Very bad.

I remember fighting that report for years and years and

years. Everybody would bring it up and throw it in my face when
I was up at the legislature. I d be presenting budgetary
requests. The campus systemwide started using me because I was
articulate enough to be able to present the material. I was sort
of looked upon as a senior dean because Berkeley campus was the
senior campus.

Co-Dean with Roy Bainer of the College of Engineering at Davis

Maslach: Continuing along this line of the academic office, I was a few
months into the deanshipmaybe six months--! realized that I was
also dean of the College of Engineering at Davis. I never heard
of this. No one ever told me. I only learned about this in a
roundabout way, in the strangest way. I started tracking this
whole thing down. Roy Bainer was the dean up there, in
residence. He explained it all to me. In the beginning of
engineering at Davis, many of the courses were taught by
engineering faculty from Berkeley. They would go up early in the
morning--it s about a one-hour portal-to-portal driveand give
their courses and stick around and do whatever necessary, and
come back.

So we were part-time Davis and part-time Berkeley. It was a

significant number. I m not talking one or two. I m talking
twenty or more faculty were doing this. Davis, of course, was
recruiting people and building. But in the beginning, the core
faculty was largely Berkeley. Roy Bainer claimed and I agree
with himthat this was the main reason Davis was able to start
 288

so quickly and achieve such quality so fast. I just did not know
that I was dean [chuckles].

So in the first year, why, Roy, of course, came up with the

idea it was about time for us to give birth to Davis and cut the
umbilical cord. There was a great ceremony. Many people came
down, and we all signed the formula for disengaging and all this
and that, systemwide. Roy Bainer was the new dean, without any
other dean. 1 was a co-dean, really. Anyway, this was one of
the little minor things.

Roy was an extraordinary person. Agricultural engineering.

One of the people you just never expected to be heavily involved
in the Washington scene, but he was. I remember he was the man
chosen by the State Department to go to Cuba and maneuver with
Fidel Castro. He was head of that committee to give one of the
things they were supposed to have is the ability to give tractors
and farm equipment to Cuba, to change and help them.

He tells the story of his meeting with Castro, in which he

sat for, like, three hours while Castro just beat him over the
head, beat the United States over the head. And so at the end,
Bainer had, like, one sentence. "Does this mean no?" And the
interpreter nodded no, so Bainer just got up and walked out
[chuckles] and went home. But nothing ever happened. He s a
wonderful person, just wonderful.

The Davis campus is one that I truly enjoy. I think it s

one of the great products of our expansion of campuses. One of

the features, I thinkself-serving, I knowbut I think this
concept of having a parent campus help a new campus in this way
worked very, very well really did work very well. I ve got lots
of examples that I could show of how well it worked. Even today
we still have a liaison with Davis, closer than we do with Santa
Cruz or any other campus.

started to branch out from the community college concepts

I
and recruitment, to this expansion here in the university. It
did not affect engineering too much in the beginning. There were
already colleges of engineer ing- -in Los Angeles, and one had just
started in Santa Barbara. Davis was well established. And then
there were hopes to start engineering at other schools-
Riverside, for example, Irvine. Well, when they proposed it at
Riverside, I just felt this was a big mistake, and I said so. I
don t know if I did it, but certainly other people agreed with
me, and Riverside after hiring a couple of peopledropped the
whole idea.
 289

Santa Cruz never even considered anything like engineering.

They were just a liberal arts college set .n the Adirc ndacks, New
:

England [chuckles]. It was a dream child of the chancellor and

Clark Kerr, when they were both students in college, of what an
ideal campus would look like. I think they came from Bryn Mawr.
They followed much of an Eastern school conceptheavy on the
humanities .

The increase in enrollment of engineering took place slowly,

but the main thing I want to do is put an exclamation point on my
recruitment techniques. Even though we had half a dozen campuses
at the university and about a dozen colleges within the state
college system, and half a dozen private colleges Stanford, USC
and so on, especially USC--more than one-third of all transfer
students out of these community colleges came to Berkeley, only
Berkeley.

Years later, like 66, 67, why," the other campuses started
to wake up. Their enrollments were down, and they did not have
the size, so they started the same thing that I did getting
faculty to go out to community colleges, but they didn t know
about my secret of working with the advisors or bringing along a
student. This kind of recruitment is no longer carried out
because we were flooded with students, just flooded.

Changes in Curriculum to Accommodate Transfer Students

Maslach: You mentioned that in my community college activity I worked on

this transfer process from the curriculum standpoint namely,
that a student in a community college, say, down here in Oakland
cannot get certain math courses and therefore is not eligible to
transfer under the old common lower division. What I did was to
petition in our change of curriculum that we would have an open
spot, an open course in the junior year for students to make up a
deficiency because the course was not available at the community
college level.

Later I expanded that with Rod Park, who was the dean of L &
S. We changed it so that we had students eligible to come from
the community colleges, enroll in extension, and to take class
work on the Berkeley campus. This was, of course, unheard of.
Just think of this: we would have dozens of students in the
northern California area coming to the Berkeley campus for one
course. They were essentially getting their toes into the
Berkeley environment by taking that one course, which was not
available at their community college.
 290

Of course, I got great kudos for this concept because it

helped the community college. If a math course would have no
more than eight or ten students, the community college was loath
to give that course when a competing course in the social
sciences would have a hundred students. Just think of the FTE
concept. It s just worth a lot more.

These are the things that basically helped us with community

college transfers.

Swent : I particularly wanted to ask about this one course that somebody
I talked to--I ve talked to several people--said that you rode
herd on for about ten years. Was it fluid mechanics? Here we
are, EA5. This is Cline Garland that I spoke to, and he said
that you and he went to a conference in Fresno, and you stayed up
very late, after the resolution, recommending courses. EA5 was
one, and material processing laboratory was too expensive for
most of the junior colleges, and you arranged this kind of
extension--

Maslach: Right.

Swent: --and had to ride herd on it for about ten years.

Maslach: Yes, that was true [laughs]. Actually, what he was talking about
was the introduction of this concept of common lower division
with the flexibility of one course that we could give, because
the materials coursemetallurgy and the laboratorieswas an
expensive course for a community college. It s rather odd to
bring that up at this point because that was especially true at
small community colleges out in the sticks, out in the podunk
area. I really mean this. You go to a community college, and
it s a beautiful community college, but it s in an area where
there s very little population. You go to Shasta or you go to
others. It s a long drive. You look, but then you realize the
great, great problems they have because, while a community
college is central to the town and 50 percent of their curricula
work is done at night, with adult students, to take this little
piece of engineering and demand that there be a laboratory, is
being a little presumptuous, for the university to take that
position.

So never took that position.

I I was always on the side of
the community colleges. But every once in a while, you d go to a
community college like Foothill, down here on the [San Francisco]
Peninsulawealthy district. They have a materials laboratory
that s far better than the one we have here at Berkeley. The
most modern equipment, all kinds of space, everything it s just
 291

beautiful, absolutely beautiful. I d go down there and drool,

just looking at that space and all that equipment [chuckles).

So the community colleges differ really quite a bit.

Swent: You were just going to give me an example.

Maslach: Well, for example, 1 got into this business, and I was always
surprised by things I learned. For example, San Antonio. Mt .

SAC [Mt. San Antonio College]. I knew it as a place where the

track meet, the Mt. SAC relays this was a big thing in track,
just like the Modesto relays in track. It was held at this
community college. Then I found out from our records at the
undergraduate office that Mt SAC sent us some of our best
.

students, really. Where is Mt SAC? Way up in the boondocks, of

.

course. I made it a point that I just had to go and visit that

place. I was just amazed at the total discipline that was there
--the faculty, the quality, the emphasis on the best. They
really came through in so many ways. I m not denigrating other
community colleges, but this place was kind of special and still
is today.

I find it rather interesting to see that the governor is

talking about performance criteria of high schools. Well, 1
remember when California Notes, a magazine that went out freely
to all the colleges and high schools, etc., around the state of
California would have always on the front page a little box that
would list the top twenty high schools in the state of California
in terms of the student performance here at Berkeley, and also
the top twenty community collegesor ten colleges, or something
like that.

Number one in the high schools I always remember, outside of

Los Angeles, where the Rose Bowl is

Swent: Pasadena?

Maslach: Pasadena High School every year was number one. So I went to
Pasadena and talked to the students about coming to Berkeley. I
know this is going to sound exaggerated, but it s the honest-to-
God truth because I can count the days: I went in my last years I
was dean I was going to sixty community colleges every year,
maybe ten or twenty high schools. So recruiting was a major
thing, especially that period 67, 68.
"66, Of course, I left
in the seventies, but I really, really gave it all my energy.
 292

And the reason I did it, of course, was I went to get FTE
faculty, to get space. With Dave Brown working on the space and
the support budget, you know, I was able to push it. Now, a
hundred and fifty faculty were active when I took over the
college actually on board, teaching courses full-time, ladder-
rank faculty, not lecturers. And then I just kept picking away
at this, and I talked Ed Strong into a major input of new
faculty, to build up our Department of Industrial Engineering and
bring in the whole new concepts of operations research, which was
the big thing that was moving in that area.

Of course, I was able to petition for faculty for electrical

engineering, which was growing rapidly, and the newly-developed

area, computer science. When I left the deanship--and I m
counting my last budget, which was inherited by Ernie Kuh, and
you count the number of faculty, it was 203. One of my
conditions for going on as provost was that Al Bowker would agree
to my [chuckles] budget the last year I was dean, which included
a number of faculty [chuckles]. I know I had opposition from
Errol Mauchlan and others, but Al did it.

Swent : There was at some point a bit of a flap over the computer
studies.

Maslach: Oh, yes, it changed, but that is a two-part statement, and I m

going to have to reserve part of it because part of it was when I
was provost. That was kind of maybe the more dynamic.

But just to show how things happen and the sense of

curricula, people would constantly come up with ideas of
expanding certain areas, amalgamating areas, cutting down on
certain areas, and so on. For example, I am known as the man who
did away with the College of Mines [chuckles]. Sorry about that!
But at one point, in analyzing the budget, we had something like
eight faculty and a total of four students. Something had to be
done. I worked with the people, and it was all done, all in full
agreement. Everybody knew what was happening. We finally did
away with the College of Mines, actually.

Don McLaughlin had a few choice words for me, and other
people did as well, but we simply had to do it because it was a
luxury we could not afford. There were a number of sadnesses
there, too, as well. One man committed suicide, I remembernot
because we did away with Mining but he had a variety of other
reasons. But I always felt that suicide on my shoulders. I
really did.
 293

Computer Science, a New Engineering Activity, Contested by L&S

Maslach: But on the brighter side was the starting of new activities. Of
course, computer science is the biggest one. It was pushed by
Lotfi Zadeh, who is best known, of course, today for the fact
that he developed the theory and practice of fuzzy sets. It s a
mathematical term, and he has achieved great awards from Japan
and other nations throughout the world on his work. He was just
as brilliant as an administrator with ideas, in electrical
engineering.

He saw more clearly the changing of electrical engineering

and the rise of computer sciences and the need for electrical
engineering to be dominant in this field. You could take a look
at computer science and say, well, a lot of it is mathematics,
and so on, but basically the physical activities, hardware, which
was dominant in those days, was all electrical engineering. The
architecture of the computerwe had courses in this, computer
architecture and software development, as it came along later.
Hardware first; software later.

It was dominated by people in engineering, especially

electrical engineering, but also industrial engineering and other
areas. Some of our top people teaching courses came out of
mechanical, electrical, civil, and so on. The use of computers
was overwhelmingly engineering and the physical sciences. So
Lotfi we were in constant contact because I continued the dean s
coordinating advisory council, and I was working on all these
things that I got out of the Granlibakken agreements and so on.
I was having more such retreats as I became dean.

Lotfi just was pushing for computer sciences, so he was

slowly taking and using his FTE to move that development within
electrical engineering. The thing that happened while I was dean
was that I received a message from the dean of L & S, who was
Bill Fretter, who was a close friend of mine. He said, "George,
I d like to have you come over, maybe with Lotfi, and let s talk
about computer sciences." Uh-oh. So I alerted Lotfi. This is
big brother, The College of L & S. It is larger than us by about
three to one as far as students maybe four to one. They were
the dominant college, of course, of the campus.

So Lotfi and I convened and figured out all of the

possibilities and strategies. So we went over there. The
meeting was essentially just a formal greeting and then telling
us what the College of Letters and Science was going to do;
namely, they were going to start a department of computer
 294

sciences, which they did. It alerted us that we should be moving

more rapidly over in engineering.

remember Lotfi and I walking away and saying, "What do we

I
do It was a problem for a number of years.
now?" In fact, the
problem went on beyond my deanship because it was very confusing
for top people in the field outside to understand what the hell
was going on in computer sciences in Berkeley. We have a
department over in L & S, staffed mainly by mathematicians and a
few industrial engineer types; but over here you had a much
larger operation, with lots of computer sciences people in
electrical engineering.

Actually, the L & S decision caused a disagreement between

us in a certain sense but, more importantly, caused confusion to
the outside world. We suffered in our recruiting of faculty
during that period, and the engineering computer science program,
which was just a-borning, was hurt by that.

m jumping ahead, but when I became provost, one of the

I
things I was able to do was to convince the chancellor s office
that the basic curricula in computer sciences should reside with
electrical engineering and, most importantly, the introductory
courses at the lower division were to be taught by engineering
faculty. That occurred around 1973, so that was in the distance.

But in between we had suffered with this whole operation.

But we went ahead and increased, as I said, the size of faculty.
Today, of course, you must realize that electrical engineering
and computer sciences together is the dominant department within
the college. Whinnery, Kuh, were deans--and instead of a
rotation of the deans--like one from electrical engineering,
followed by one from mechanical, followed by one from civil,
followed by one that has kind of fallen apart. The last two
deans have both been from electrical engineering.

Reorganization of Other Engineering Curricula

Maslach: Other activities were going on, of course. Mechanical

engineering, my department, made the final step to bring all
these divisions into a single department and work their curricula
into a logical fashion. The other departments civil engineering
was under the leadership of Harmer Davis and Harry Seed, Harry
Bolton Seed, one of the great, great men in the field of soil
mechanics, internationally; was probably the number one man for
many years. They were moving that whole curriculum forward.
 295

The smaller departmentsnuclear engineering was moving at a

sedate pace and attracted many top faculty. Industrial
engineering, with the addition of operations research, expanded
nicely. And then the smaller departmentsmaterials science and
mineral engineering, naval architecture, which is truly tiny--and
incidentally, just recently was demolished; it no longer exists,
starting this last year. But these smaller groups let s make
sure I got them all in thereone, two, three, four, five yes,
got them all in there.

But the smallest one was Packy Schade, who was a dominant
figure in naval architecture in the United States during World
War II, and following, and other faculty. But they really had
only two and a half faculty. One of them was John Weyhausen, who
was an applied mathematician. I remember looking over his vitae,
and I said, "Gee, they really deserve another half FTE. Make
that man a whole. He s really doing ^full-time work." He s a
great man in his field, to start with. I remember how joyous

they were when I gave him a half FTE, and they had [chuckles] a
full three faculty members in their department.

There were only three schools or departments of naval

architecture in the United States: Berkeley, MIT, and then the
private Parsons School in New York. I think I got that right.

Swent : There s a Parsons School of Design.

Maslach: Yes, that s it. So anyway

Swent : You were doing a good deal of work with MIT, too.

Maslach: That comes under my next stage here.

Swent : All right.

Serving on the MIT Review Committee

Maslach: Now I want to embark on how I inherited so many things that I

never knew was going to happen. It s hard to believe all the
things that occurred, just because I was dean at Berkeley
because of Berkeley, not me Berkeley College of Engineering.
,

Why, I was asked to do things on a national level. MIT, which I

knew well and I knew the director of the Institute of Engineering
Research there very well--

Swent : Who was that? What was his name?

 296

Maslach: Oh, can t remember that.

I That goes way back. He s not only
retired but long since died. He was my senior by ten or fifteen
years. But then I got to MIT before I was deanbecause of a
problem in 1958, early sixties but I was asked by MIT to serve
on one of their review committees. MIT is a corporation, and the
corporation appoints one-third of the review committee, the
faculty appoints one-third of the review committee, and then the,
quote, "administration" appoints one-third--so it s sort of the
regents and the chancellor and the faculty appointing this review
committee .

Technical Advisor for the Department of Commerce

Maslach: So started getting on review committees.

I The same thing
happened in Washington, D.C. Herb Holloman, who was the
assistant secretary of commerce--he knew people here, and he knew
me casually, and he immediately wanted me on the technical
advisory board for the Department of Commerce. Well, that kind
of started--! had been going to Washington, of course, as
director of the Office of Research Services, to build up our
research program, and in the space field I had gone to many, many
conferences because, let s face it, space had exploded on the
world in 1958, and when Kennedy promised a man on the moon, why,
it was big time.

And since we were the largest group doing upper atmosphere

aerodynamic research, we were in big demand. Washington wanted
us to build an enormous wind tunnel out at the field station, and
we pointed out it really wasn t worth it because the kinds of
problems you could solve in a wind tunnel were small and could be
handled by theory. So we saved the government probably a billion
dollars right there [chuckles]. It was big. But their ideas
were just enormous. They did not know the scale of what they
were talking about. I mean, you re working in high vacuum
systems such as we had, and it was the sort of thing that should
have been done down at NASA.

Swent: Moffett?

Maslach: Yes, Moffett Field. And we had a group down at Moffett Field
with a small tunnel, and we worked closely with them. So I knew
the national scene in a technical sense. Now I was getting into
it in an academic sense, and I was getting into it in an advisory
sense, which I had never, never expected, which was totally new
to me .
 297

Twenty Years of Committee and Advisory Service to the Navy

Maslach: I don t want to belabor the point, but somewhere in there I was
asked to be on the academic advisory board of the Naval Academy
in Annapolis. I was there for five years as a member of the
board. Very prestigious board, with lots of top people from
major industrial and banking organizations. I was sort of out of
my element there for a while, just looking around at the people
there. But the second five years, I was the chairman of the
board [chuckles].

In this regard, I met, of course, both as a member or

chairman, all kinds of political people, especially in the navy.
John Warner, for example, now Senator John Warner, was secretary
of the navy. For years, he pushed me to put my name in for
secretary of the navy. 1 was getting all this kind of pressure

upon me. As I flew to Washington, I would think about this

problem in terms of my ten-year career concept. 1 really felt
that people in the universities and a lot of them do--go into a
part-time career with the government and then take a government
position at some point. Put up or shut up. Actually take an
administrative post.

A lot of people do at the undersecretary level, usually for

about a two-year period. If you watch the Washington scene, this
is the way people rotate in and outbring in new ideas, new
people. So I gave that serious consideration at various times.
But I then was also on the advisory board of the postgraduate
naval school down at Monterey. Again, member for five years and
chairman for five years. So I gave twenty years of committee
duty to the navy, plus other things the navy asked me to do.

I turned down the air force. They wanted me on an advisory

committee. I turned down other things. I did say no to a lot of
different things. But I found myself going back to Washington
more and more. One of the things I m proud of is I got involved
with the Department of the Interior. My name is on a big thick
report on waste disposal.

Swent : I noticed that, and I was wondering how that came about.

Maslach: Solid waste disposal. Basically, Commerce put out all of these
reports commissioned these things we had a lot of good ones.
One of them, for example, was "Air Pollution and the Electric
Automobile," in 1966, 65. Things we proposed then weren t done
until 75. Some of them haven t been done yet in 95 [sic].
It s odd for me to look back and look at those old reports--!
don t look at them, actuallybut think of those old reports.
 298

There was a big push to use the technique of pushing air

down against the water surface, raising a hull, which is
designed--hovercraft--and then go out at high speed over the
waves. Well, this is used in England, cross channel, and there s
a couple of other uses. They were used briefly here in the San
Francisco Bay. You make a hell of a racket with this thing. The
noise level is extraordinarily high. I was chair of the
committee that turned out that report on the future use of the
hovercraft concept.

Swent : This was for Commerce?

Maslach: Commerce. It was negative, that there are so many things-

there s a lot of research necessary before we could really find
something greatly useful. The navy was interested. They were
talking about having ships the size of destroyers. When you
start looking at the weight, you re talking aboutwe were not
even close, so I got to be known around Washington as someone who
could get a report out fast [chuckles] and no nonsense. I used
to do these kinds of things pretty fast.

Swent: It s a good reputation to have.

Maslach: I got on all kinds of committees. George Shultz, who is well

known to everybody with his career in WashingtonSecretary of
State and so on--he came to Berkeley when he was dean of the
school of business administration at Chicago. I ll tell you a
secret. Most of the top people in industry have engineering
degrees, followed by a master of business administration.
Really--big, big percentage of the CEOs. I m not talking about
the financial top people or the legal top people or the
engineering top people. They kind of don t get up to there. I m
talking of CEOs. They are heavily in that category. I learned,
from George Shultz.

So he was out here to recruit our students [chuckles) at the

bachelor s level to go to Chicago. He did what I was doing at
the junior college level. We started a friendship that has
lasted until this day, of course. He and I are quite good
friends. He went into Washington, of course, and a lot of our
people here went into Washington. I don t know if you recall,
but when Kennedy made his speech here in the stadiuma hundred
thousand people one of the things he pointed out was that it s
false, the concept that the Kennedy administration was basically
an administration based on Harvard people. There were more
people in the Kennedy administration from Berkeley than from
Harvard.

Swent: Really?
 299

Maslach: This was true. You look down at all the secretaries and
undersecretaries, why, this was true. He said that s why he felt
so close to Berkeley.

A Jet-Set Professor, Going to Washington Many Weekends

Maslach: So anyway, I got into this Washington thing. I ll bring the next
time an article that was written primarily about me and also
1

about George Pimentel, professor of chemistry, who was an

extraordinary professor. Died of cancer a number of years ago.
I literally wept when I last saw him. He was so wasted away.
One of the great minds of our time. Heavily involved in the
National Science Foundation. That was his Washington trip. But
basically it was the jet-set professors, going back and forth.

There were times when I was going every weekend. The

process was very simple: you catch the two o clock flight out of
San Francisco; you get into Washington about 10 p.m. By the time
you get your bag and you get to your transportation and get to
the hotel, you read your newspaper, you watched the eleven
o clock news, and then you just went to bed.

Then you worked all day Saturday, worked all day Sunday, and
you got back to the airport--in the beginning there were
limousines, but then after that, why, it was the buses and so on.
You d take either the TWA flight at six or the United flight at
six-fifteen and arrive, San Francisco time, at about eight
o clock and get your car and all this and that, and get back home
ten o clock at night, say hello to your wife [chuckles], and go
to work the next morning.

I set a record when I was working on a committee which was:

should we build an SST? This was late in my career at
Washington. We came up with: I went eight weekends in a
"No."

row to get out that report. It was under the directionwe were
doing the report for the science advisor to President [Richard
M.] Nixon. This was Lee DuBridge, who before that had been
president of Caltech and before that had been my boss as director
of the Radiation Laboratory at MIT. Lee and I just were good
friends. He called upon me many, many times to do these kinds of
things. The last time I saw him was in the men s room of the

Look, 23 February 1965. "Jet-Age Professors, A Gathering Conflict

Disrupts the Dream Life of America s New Elite," p. 36-38.

 300

Faculty Club [laughs]. Sort of an odd place to see him again,

but we certainly enjoyed each other.

I would go one weekend, and every once in a while I d talk

my wife, Doris, into coming because I had another set of meetings

and then I had to stay, and then we would be in Washington during
that time for vacation and then fly back together. We did a
number of these trips.

A humorous story is called for here because when Heyns was

chancellor and we were having, still, our problems with the
Filthy Speech Movement, which followed--Marty Meyerson--and then,
of course, we had the Third World Movement disturbances and
trashing of buildings under the period when Heyns was chancellor.
He once said, in front of the dean s coordinating advisory
committee, that he is now requiring me--Maslach--to tell him
whenever I was leaving town because every time I left town, a
major crisis erupted, [laughter]

There was a little truth in this. More times than I care to

tell you, I would watch the eleven o clock news, and there was a
big disturbance on the Berkeley campus [chuckles]. It was kind
of a joke on this jet-age professor business.

The Chancellor s Coordinating Advisory Council

Maslach: But getting back to kind of a home ground for a moment, the
dean s coordinating advisory council was replicated on the
chancellor s level, and the chancellor has his coordinating
advisory council, which included all the deans on campus, all the
chairmen of the big research units like the Rad Lab was under
the chancellor at that time a number of top people from the
administration business office, and so on. Okay? There was
about thirty people. I would come in there. I found out that
there was rank [chuckles] and privileges and what have you. I
was shown my seat, and it was just down from the dean of L & S.
I was sitting next to a friend, who I knew at MIT, who was the
director at that time of the man was Professor Edward McMillan
a Nobel Prize winner.

Maslach: Next to me was Martin Meyerson, [at] my first chancellor s

advisory meeting. As we introduced ourselves, Martin and I, and
from then on- -kind of a team. I was deeply involved in all of
the internal mechanics of the college, and the changes on the
 301

campus. But he was getting involved in what I would call larger-

scale philosophical ideas. I don t know if you ever heard him

speak.

Swent: No, I didn t.

Maslach: He was a great orator. He had a fantastic ability with words.

He was given all kinds of little nicknames. The Athens of the
West, of course, is Berkeley, and here he was. one of the major
philosophers of the Athens of the West. Well, that s kind of
stretching it, but he hated it, too. But we got to know each
other quite well and were working together quite well.

These coordinating council meetings at the chancellor s

level during that first year were historical and very, very
frightening.

Swent: Was this a new concept?

Maslach: Oh, no, no. The concept was old. In fact, it was replicated not
only at the college level by us but it s also replicated by the
chancellors meeting with the presidents at the university level.
The humorous part was for years they would have great difficulty
trying to figure out what to call it at the statewide level
because the combination of C s--campus and chancellors and so on
--and O s--ended up, they called it the Coo Coo Club. For years,
all of the staff was calling it that. Finally, they changed the
name and only old-timers like me remember that [chuckles].

The Free Speech Movement

Maslach: The problem I m trying to lead into now is going to get into the
FSM because through my relations with Ed Strong, I kind of knew
what was happening, of course. When the Republicans had their
convention, the FSM movement started on the sidewalk outside of
campus. Buses from [Nelson] Rockefeller s camp would come and
pick up students, put them up into the balconies and also around
the Cow Palace, where the convention was held, to cheer for
Rockefeller and to boo Goldwater, who eventually, of course, got
the nomination. Senator [William] Knowland wrote a letter to
Clark Kerr. A copy of it got down, of course, to the campus
level. Very secret. He objected to what was happening. Of
course, we had nothing to do with it. The sidewalk- -the buses
were not ours, and there was nothing on the campusesbut they
were recruiting people who wanted a free ride to go see the
Republican convention and, in the meantime, root for Rockefeller.
 302

I remember seeing those buses. I d go down when I heard

about this. I d go down to look at them. Of course, Bill
Knowland was then known as the senator from China or Taiwan,
really, Chiang Kai-shek relationships. He was presidential
timbre during those days but never, never made it to the final
drawing. The whole thing started with all these little
mechanisms, quietly. And then the Free Speech Movement evolved
because of the very strange, coincidental, historical moment.

Katherine Towle, wartime head of the women s Marines she

had the highest rank of any woman in the Defense Department-
became dean of students here at Berkeley. Wonderful woman and
wonderful leader. The infamous day when the police car came out
onto Sproul Plaza, she was meeting with student leaders in her
of f ice--Sproul Hall about this problem, which was essentially
the placement of advertisement posters and so on. They were
restricted from the campus, and they could only be on that strip
outside of the campus. You can go there and see the bronze
markings of where the Regents property is and what s city
property.

It was essentially these posters and so on that in part

blocked the way onto the campus.

Swent :
Tables, weren t there also?

Maslach: Tables came later. There were tables there, maybe, on the strip,
but mostly they were the big, double cardboard posters. They
would keep coming into the area where students would be walking
into the campus. The technique was the table concept was born
there you re right because that s where people were being
harangued to come and listen to this or come and pick up this
literature or join this organization and so on. The table fight
was really the communication fight there on a strip outside of
the campus with all the students being bused out to the
convention. This was kind of the beginning of the whole thing.

It s so innocuous when you kind of think about it. But we

had on the campus a large number of students who were politically
mature and active. We haven t mentioned it in the sixties
periodthe civil rights movement. The Student Nonviolent
Coordinating Committee, SNCC [pronounced Snick]. That was a big
operation. You had people that are now historical. You know,
Carmichael Carmichael Stokely Carmichael, others were national
figures long before Malcolm X and so on.

So you kind of went through this period in which there was

an increasing activity. When I later talked to the daughter of
Ray Carman at General Precision Laboratories in Pleasantville,
 303

New York, where I worked for a couple of years, and who was
heavily involved in SNCC, she told me that Berkeley was the most
active political campus in the United States. I thought some of
the campuses in New York were, but she said, no. Berkeley
"Oh,

was way far ahead as far as political activity, involvement."

It s true. Take a single example. More people from

Berkeley went into the Peace Corps than any other place-
overwhelming- -into the Peace Corps. I didn t realize that we had
all of those elements in a very volatile operation.

When the police car was driven up, Katherine was still up
there, and she said--later told me--said, were signing the
"We

agreement of what we were going to do." This whole problem was

being solved in the regular use of the dean of students office
and student leaders. Now, why did the car get onto the Sproul
Plaza? Well, the police department is in the basement of Sproul
Hall. Cars are parked behind Sproul ^Hall. A man who I shall not
name but who was the business manager of the Berkeley campus at
that time short, stocky manwas infuriated by the fact that
tables were being set up. He called the police department and
ordered the police car out onto this Sproul Plaza.

Swent : This was a Berkeley city police?

Maslach: No, no. Berkeley campus police. That was how the car got out
there. The chancellor s office didn t know a goddamn thing about
it. No other academic or administration person was involved.
The president s office didn t know anything about it. The whole
thing was just remarkable, that some person way down the ladder,
in an area that has no responsibilityhe had no signature
authority, if 1 may use that phrase that I introduced earlier to
do what he did. That essentially started the FSM movement,
because the car was blocked. They let the air out of the tires
and so on. The infamous man inside the car was allowed to go out
and go to the bathroom and was fed and brought back into the car.
You could see all of this. Just watch it, day and night, going
on. That s when Mario Savio and Arthur Goldberg were the two
main ones spoke on top of the car.

Arthur Goldberg, who is still very active here in the

Berkeley area, was the stage manager. His secret was he never
once let go of the microphone. He would hold that microphone and
hold it in front of Savio, and Savio therefore would be able to
use both arms in his gesturing and so on. But Arthur Goldberg
never, never, never let go of that microphone.

It was a fantasy, a dream coming out. I d go down there at

nights. These sixteen-hour days I m not joking. I d just watch
 30A

the dynamics of this whole operation. I remember one night being

down there with a neighbor, a young woman who was a student here
at Berkeley, and we watched when there was an almost bloody
confrontation of what I would call the activists and, on the
other hand, the fraternity boys. The fraternity boys were known
for drinking their beer but the activists were also. You could
just see the tenseness which was induced not just by the
philosophical jargon that was being bandied back and forth, but
there was almost a point of confrontation. And if the
confrontation had occurred, I m quite sure the fraternity boys
would have won because the activists were really rather small in
number at that point.

But that was another element that escalated the whole

process because fraternities and sororities in general have gone
downhill in recent years, and I think it started roughly at about
that time. I remember before there were all kinds of things that
we used to do on campus. Sponsorship by the Greeks was a very
important element. Things that we don t do anymore.

Mario Savio, Chemistry Student and FSM Leader

Maslach: The closest I got to this--my own involvement--! met Mario Savio
and others, and I talked with them. Savio was an extraordinarily
brilliant person. He really was. His brilliance still to this
day is not known. He was not academically brilliant. He came
from Queens College in New York, along with the key activists--
the Goldbergs--and two separate families of Goldbergs,
incidentally all came from the New York City environment.

Now I m going to say something that everybody is going to

laugh at and claim I m crazy, but I have proof of it. Mario
Savio was a student pursuing a degree in chemistry. He was a
member of the College of Chemistry, and his field was chemistry.
He was not that good a student in chemistry. Of course, many
books have been written about the fact that before he got into
this activism publicly at Berkeley, he stammered. He had a voice
defect and stuttered. But it disappeared once he got on top of
that car and made his first famous speech.

He spoke eloquently, and he never again stammered or

stuttered. I met him many other times in a more social context.
He really knew what he was doing. One thing that should be
emphasized is that he was nonviolent. My background is one of
the Quaker faith, and I was surprised to hear how he was
nonviolent because we were seeing violence. But it s a proven
 305

fact historically that when things got to be physical and

violent, he dropped out. He actually left the FSM movement and
went into a quiet mode for a number of years.

During that time, for example, he andI ve got a block of

the first name--Goldberg--not related to Arthurwere married and
had a child. Nineteen sixty-six the child was born in England,
on the British system, full payment by the British taxpayer. I
know that because I had my operation on my leg in 1966. Had a
bad accident skiing, Grindelwald [Switzerland], and I went to
England because they had the top bone specialists, and I was
asked did I want to have this on the economywhich meant
essentially a welfare operation. I said, "No, I ll pay for it,
the entire amount." And I did. I was at Nuf field Orthopedic
Institute at the very same time Mario s wife was delivering their
first childwhich was a great, great tragedy because the child
was born with Down s syndrome. Could tell immediately. I
remember a number of times talking with Mario, and he was holding
the baby. It was just a sad, sad period of their life.

Swent : How did they happen to be in England?

Maslach: I don t know how they happened to be in England. They obviously

had it all figured out, but they came back from England pretty
quickly. I don t know if they just went over to have a baby or
not, but that was all.

We attracted a lot of other people, activists. Some of the

names escape me now, but one from Princeton came. I always
remember seeing him down there on Sproul Plaza. He just looked
so out of place. He was in a three-piece suit, complete with
vest, tie, white shirt. He still is active around here today,
but he s an aging hippie, essentially.

Swent: He didn t have the right costume.

Maslach: Didn t have the right costume. But he was a graduate of

Princeton, and he arrived in the beginning of the FSM, pretty
quickly, and he took a prominent role. Very articulate person,
very good writer. I remember he changed his costume fairly

quickly.

Arthur Goldberg and I can t remember the young woman

Goldberg. Then, of course, we had other students who were
f acuity-related daughters, sons of faculty members here. So
Berkeley got its reputation, of course, for this great
liberalism.
 306

An Undercurrent of Factions in the University Administration

Maslach: Within the coordinating council at the chancellor s level, there

was an interplay of emotions and administrative activity that I
began to notice immediately. The vice chancellor, Alex Sherriffs
professor of psychologybut later president of the State College
System in the state of California. He was very close to Clark
Kerr. We would hi .ve these meetings, and we would discuss
problems that were developing. You can imagine all the problems
we were discussing.

Clark Kerr had been out of the country, over in Japan. He

came back and started to get into this FSM thing. Advisory at
the beginning, but later to be an active, prominent participant
in the negotiations. You had a situation here where the
chancellor, Ed Strong, and then Alex, the vice chancellor, and
every once in a while I noticed--af ter we were talking, why, Alex
would take off. He obviously got on the phone. At some point
later, he would come back, and at some point in the meeting, when
we were doing maybe trivial things, he would say, just talked
"I

to Clark Kerr." We would then hear what Clark Kerr had to say.

So we would begin to see at the very beginning these two

people who were close co-workers Ed Strong, Clark Kerr--now
chancellor, president--FSM--you could just see the whole thing
becoming a mess, a conflict of two personalities, two people who
were quite different, Ed and Clarkvery different. In between
was Alex, who was carrying tales back and forth. In my opinion,
Alex really undermined the chancellor in this regard. Instead of
coming and saying, "What should we do?" he was always coming and
saying, "This is what should be done." He was not getting direct
orders from Clark Kerr; he was, though, talking in his terms.

He had done a very well-known study of students down at

Berkeley High School. He was well known in the field of
psychology. But there was this undercurrent of factions already
in this FSM operation. Everything came to a head, of course,
when Ed Strong was removed as chancellor by the Regents, and
Clark Kerr--this is a period I ll get to.

The Strong Influence of Engineers on the Campus

Maslach: I felt that we in Engineering were not heavily involved in the

Free Speech Movement, and yet we were. We set a kind of a tone
for the campus in ways that never were historically presented by
 307

anybody because people never thought that engineers were that

socially conscious. But, just as a humor item, students in
engineering and the engineers joint council used to infiltrate
the SNCC meetings and also the meetings I m trying to think of
the follow-up of SNCC. There was another group that had
meetings. This was a national group of political activists.

Swent: Students for Democratic--

Maslach: That s it. Students for Democratic Action.

Swent: Or Society. SDS?

Maslach: Maybe it s SDS.

Swent: Students for a Democratic Society, 1 think it was.

Maslach: That was it. I found out talked with the people in the
engineers joint council. They showed me their weapon, a student
by the name of "Tiny," a nickname, Tiny. He stood about six foot
six. He was about football-player size, pro football. You know,
250 pounds, solid muscle. He wore a motorcycle outfit because he
drove the biggest Harley Davidson you ever saw in your life. He
was the stereotype of all of these things [chuckles]. The
students say, d always have him and push him up in front."
"We

They would vote in these SDS meetings, and these engineering

students through infiltration ruined the SDS operation on this
campus because they would throw the votes into negatives and vote
against taking action.

Also, the students and the faculty in Engineering discussed,

with great depth, what they would do if their classes were
interrupted. And there were some classes that were interrupted.
They never came over to Engineering because, I ll tell you right
now, if they did, there would have been violence. I had faculty
in many of the departments tell me that there was an agreement
with the faculty member and his students that if anybody came in
and tried to intercept that they would just shove the
interrupters outout of the building, out, out. That was it.
And that would be physical violence. There was no question about
that. It never happened, thank God.

The Academic Senate Passes the "Time, Place, and Manner" Rule s

Maslach: But the Engineering faculty did have an enormous impact in terms
of organizing, in terms of the faculty, in terms of what we
 308

should be doing. Remember, I had already started my movement to

get people in Engineering more involved in the Academic Senate.
We had a greater number of chairmanships and committees and also
members of committees, so we were beginning to be more oriented
in the Academic Senate.

We would have always the problem of getting out the vote. I

won t mention a couple of people because they re still around,
and I m going to say something a little negative here. But
people in the Humanities faculty often would call me up and say,
"George, this is an important meeting at the Senate. Are we
going to get out the vote? Can you get out the vote?" These are
the non-activists; these were the more moderates. I got a little
fed up with some of them because they were just using us: "Get
out the vote, George. Come on, come on. Get the people there."
We were just storm troopers to come in and get the vote out.

I told some of them off every once in a while.

Swent : What sorts of things were you voting on?

Maslach: Well, the Academic Senate is any member, ladder-rank faculty-

such as professors and a few others in there you have to
remember we re talking a grouping of potentially two thousand
people. That s the total membership. During the FSM days, we
had our largest meetings. We would fill the Wheeler Hall
auditorium, and we would overflow into the back room, which holds
about 300 more. So we would have meetings on the order of a
thousand people.

The primary thing that was under consideration and was

passed was the "time, place, and manner rules"--quotation marks
around that. Famous rules. "Time, place, and manner." It
started with the use of Sproul Plaza for the tables, the use of
Sproul Plaza for the lunchtime meetings, allowing a loud speaker
system in Sproul Plaza only during the time from twelve to one,
and how you got the speaker, etc., etc. These were "time, place,
and manner" rules. You could not do things elsewhere.

I remember dramatically one of the meetings--! remember

several of them, in factbut I remember dramatically one of the
meetings. The meeting was held on the last day of a Jewish
religious holiday. The holiday, of course, ends at sundown. I
would say six o clock. Our meeting started at five. There was a
lot of other things discussed and voted on and so on, until it
was almost like the blowing of the horn, the shofar.

The doors of Wheeler Auditorium opened, and in strode

easily, in the next half hour, a hundred or so of the Jewish
 309

faculty, who had not come to the Senate meeting until after the
holiday was over. I remember laughing with Dean Sandy Elberg,
dean of the graduate division. He was the one, of course, that
gave me all of the Israeli concepts of blowing the horn at the
end of the holiday. It came, and it was at that meeting that was
passed the "time, place, and manner"--speaking, political
activity on this campus.

Swent: You passed it after six o clock?

Maslach: Oh, yes. It was seven o clock before we left that place. These
Senate meetings would start at five and go on [until] seven,
eight o clock. I remember when I was a student we, in order to
hear a political speaker running for the presidentwould go down
and listen to him speak on Oxford street, and would sit on that
lawn at the west entrance of the campus, and he would be parked
on a truck and be speaking from the bed of the truck with a
loudspeaker system, the off-campus rule. There was no
proselytizing religion or politicalno proselytizing on campus.
That was the rule. This was the thirties, the forties. I don t
know how many speakers I ever heard. And it went on. I remember
hearing Adlai Stevenson down there.

So the change in that regulation, which was a Regents

regulation, a standing order of the Regents, was, of course, a
great benefit to this campus. People don t talk about that
aspect of it. They talk about the concept of free speech, but
I m talking about we can have on campus the Greek Theatre or
other places political figures. We had Kennedy in the stadium,
a hundred thousand people. This was wonderful.

After these things were changed, I remember we started

Heyns, I think, was the chancellorthese wonderful meetings in
the Greek Theatre. These were campus holidays. Essentially, say
from eleven to two or something like that was the campus meeting.
I remember hearing Nehru fantastic speech. And I heard other
people. That all came about because the rules were changed.
Political figures running for presidential office were out there.

These were great changes that came about, of course, in a

very, very messy way.

Swent: Did the Academic Senate change that, or did the Regents?

Maslach: We came up with the idea of how things could be done by the
students. But the concept of the getting political figures, that
had to be a change in the Regents orders, and they did that,
eventually.
 310

Swent : So these "time, place, and manner" rules were-

Maslach: Local. It was faculty rules. We just--

Swent : You were just saying that when you opened the doors and people
came in, it was so dramatic.

Maslach: There are a few things I can tell you about all these items. It
was truly dramatic because here you were, just debating
aimlessly, waiting for time. Everybody knew that we would have
this number of faculty who were observing the religious holiday.
When the doors opened--! was sitting on the aisle--! simply had
to laugh and watch this whole thing because I knew exactly what
was going to happen. Of course, it did. We voted the rules, and
everything was fine.

We had, as I said, some engineering involvement, some of

which I wasn t exactly proud of. I was proud of the students and
their involvement, but I was not proud of some our faculty
operations. One group actually sort of set up a security
organization. In order to have the Senate meetings and other
meetings held without interruption by activists, they essentially
stood guard at doorways and stuff like that. Violence never
occurred, but it was something of a police state feeling about
this whole thing, on campus. I just couldn t believe this was

happening.

One of the persons I used to sit with in the chancellor s

coordinating meetings was Newman, Frank Newman, professor and
dean of law. He was a wonderful guy. He worked his way through
college as a piano player. I used to kid him about that. He was
actually very good. In the Faculty Club Christmas parties, he
was always the piano player. Honky-tonk type piano, you know,
for different kinds of singing.

remember him in one of those chancellor meetings, when

I

things were at the darkest. Frank turned to me--we were talking

about the "time, place, and manner" rules and he predicted that
are going to be lucky to be able to preserve the sanctity of
"we

our classrooms. We are giving up the campus grounds, the lobbies

of buildings, the hallways of buildings." He was just very
dramatic in that. While he was not proven correct during the
Free Speech Movement era of time, later on, when the Third World
movement activities were leading to the trashing of buildings,
what he predicted did turn out. We did not have control of all
these buildings. That s all there was to it. Windows were
smashed, right and leftnot nearly as bad as they were later on
 311

at Stanford, but here at Berkeley we had quite a bit of that

violence during that latter periodnot FSM, after the Filthy
Speech Movement, which was the next one to come in there.

So anyway, I was in this fantastically enviable position:

being big on the Washington scene, touring community colleges,
working actively with the curricular development and the budget
and developing space, getting new buildings and so on. I was
heavily involved in the chancellor s coordinating council. Only
a few of us would speak up: the dean of L & S, myself, Martin
Meyerson, Frank Newman. That was it, on the academic side.

The people from the business offices and so on who were down
at the foot of the table would have their own conversations about
other things. Every once in a while, Ed Strong would have to rap
his knuckles on the table and tell them to shut up. If they
didn t want to participate, they could leave. Of course,
everybody would fall silent at that point.

Here was Alex going back and forth. I could see things

developing right and left. Now, when I became dean, I had a

meeting with Clark Kerr. He and I, of course, had known each
other, worked together on various things at the campus level. I
saw him a few times at the Quaker meeting. He lists himself as a
Quaker, but he is not a member of the meeting. He has never
taken the final step. You re either a birth-right Quaker, or you
are a Quaker who has adopted the concepts. You must essentially
pass a--I ll call it an oral discussion with the elders of the
Quaker meeting.

A Challenging Conversation with President Clark Kerr

Swent : Which meeting do you go to?

Maslach: On Vine Street.

So we got together, at his insistence. He said, "George,

I d like to have
you come down." I said, "Fine." We were
talking. Of course, one of the things we were talking about
early on was Frances moving down to systemwide, and he was all
for that. He was very fond of Frances and her abilities. So we
got talking about the College of Engineering. He made a number
of statements as to quality. He just didn t think it was there.
So at one point I said, "Well, where do you rank us nationwide?"
He had us down, oh, tenth, seventh, tenthsomething like that.
 312

Well down. And I said, no.

"Oh, We re far better than that."
Well, I couldn t prove it, since I was just getting into the act.

So he made a statement. We were talking about systemwide

engineering, and he said, "For example, UCLA isn t really
developing well at all, and that s because the dean there is a
former faculty member at Berkeley, L. M. K. Boelter." Well, L.
M. K. Boelter was one of the great, great giants of the field of
heat transfer and fluid mechanics. But he did have this one
concept, which was that you could educate an engineer in a four-
year program and turn out this high-level person who is really a
Renaissance man.

I disagreed with the concept. It was going backwards into

giving greater emphasis on the four-year education and not going
forward, like Mike was saying--going on to the graduate work. I
countered the Los Angeles argument by saying, "Davis is doing
very well, and we helped Davis get started, and we didn t hurt
Davis." He said, "Well, it s not that good." He was still
defending himself.

And then I just got one of my usual brilliant but nasty

ideas, so 1 said, "Well, you can t blame Santa Barbara on us."
Santa Barbara was a campus that had been started and had gone on
slowly and is doing very well now--in fact, chemical engineering,
for example, just one area, I think it s great; Santa Barbara is
well up there nationwide. But in the beginning, Kerr had
organized the appointment and the adoption of the faculty of the
College of Engineering at Yale, a field which had been disbanded
at Yale. The dean and a number of faculty were available, and he
had proposed that they come to Santa Barbara. He had done it, of
course, through the Santa Barbara chancellor. But here was this
group, this whole group of ten people. Of course, that s quite a
change in the campus environment.

The Santa Barbara people were not that gung-ho to have the
Yale people take overthe dean and everythingand they were
against it in part and reviewing, as we do, the appointment of a
faculty member of tenure, they turned down quite a few. At some
point and how and why I don t know, but at some point, all of
the files of that group came to Berkeley. We were asked to
review them. I think this was done by the chancellor s office.
I ll get into this a little more later.

But remember--! was not dean at the time; John Whinnery

I
wasbut remember being on review committees for some of these
I
people. Basically, we only saw maybe two out of this group of
ten or twelve that we thought were correct for Santa Barbara, in
terms of our standards. So that bolstered the Santa Barbara
 313

position, and they eventually hired maybe three. Santa Barbara

was really struggling. Quality was just not there in those early
days .

I remember this discussion with Clark Kerr. I m in his

office, which is a beautiful of f icespartan, as he was. His
chairs were beautiful and designed by Mies van der Rohe--famous
architect. They were called the Barcelona chairs. They were
chrome-plated and black leather. They had this beautiful line,
very comfortable. He had four of them. Beautiful rug and so on.
We sat there. This was getting pretty late. I remember it was
dusk. But I could see Clark blushed with anger when I told him,
re not responsible for Santa Barbara." [chuckles)
"We Remember,
he s two notches above me in the hierarchy, and I shouldn t be
speaking to him in that kind of a tone. But he took it very
well. We went on as friends, you know.

Achieving One Goal: Berkeley Engineering Ranked at the Top

Maslach: Just to kind of complete the ranking position, before the end of
my first year, there was a ranking of all departments--! m
talkingnot all, but twenty, thirty departments per campus of
major campuses. This was the first of the big reviews of all
universities both private and public. Berkeley came out first,
as a university, Berkeley. We had twenty-eight or thirty,
departments ranked. Four departments were in engineering. Of
course, Harvard and I knew all about this because my kids in
Harvard were sending me all this stuff, you know [chuckles] from
the newspapers and the journals in Harvard.

The reasoning was that Berkeley ranked so high because they

had those four departments of engineering, which rank high, and
Harvard had no engineering. So Harvard was handicapped by not
having these four departments. And that s true, but whether that
affected the overall ranking because when you take all the other
departments, we rank very high with regard to Harvard and the
College of L & S here and the college at Harvard.

had the great joy of being able to call Clark Kerr.

I I

didn t say, quite, told you

"I so." I said, "Clark, did you see
that review?" Because in engineering, Berkeley came out second
to MIT. [laughs] So I was vindicated by a review which
supported me but I really, if you had asked me then, ahead of
time, I would not have bet that we would be number two. Maybe
down to three. But we were number two. And we were ahead of
 314

number three by a good margin. So I felt pretty good about all

of that.

Later on, reviews came and Berkeley always had a very high
standing. In the period when Ernie Kuh was the dean of
Engineering, following me, a nine-year period following my tenure
as deanBerkeley Engineering achieved number one ranking in the
United States, ahead of MIT, ahead of Stanford. Then, after a
few years, we had another review, and essentially now in
engineering, the latest reviews tend to lump MIT, Stanford, and
Berkeley together. We are tied for number one. They don t try
to separate us because the differences are so minute, so forget
it. So in terms of the ranking, which I had these words with
Clark Kerr, I won that argument by having other people proving
it. I checked off the first of my assignments from Ed Strong,
because when he and I sat down and talked about that ranking and
so on, he was just in seventh heaven that Engineering was number
two. A close number two; the next time it came around, we were
number one. So that aspect was very, very good.

Clark Kerr s Enormous Influence on Education

Maslach: But Clark and I were not always adversarial, but we are willing
to always debate points. We had a very good rapport--still do--
the last time I saw him, we were just crossing campus and we
bumped into each other. We just stood there and talked for half
an hour about University problems and so on. He had that
enormous influence on educationnot only nationally but truly
internationally. He was one of the architects of the tripartite
agreement with the state colleges and the universities and the
community colleges.

While Sproul started the articulation concept back in 37,

with expansion of the university to all these other campuses at
Santa Barbara we took over a state college down there. That was
that original campus. And we gave up rights to have a university
campus somewhere else. We gave up the Kellogg-Voorhies site,
with that beautiful herd of Arabian horses came from the Kellogg
Foundation. So a lot of these things were discussable, and we
carried on a lot of discussions, Clark and I.

In fact just as kind of a side issue, off to the side here

--the last meeting in Clark s home and office here I attended at
his invitation. A man in Engineering at Cornell was one of his
guests of honor. He and I are old friends, so I was invited.
That dinner meeting and discussion of education problems
 315

nationwide occurred just days before Clark Kerr was fired. He

knew it was coming, and it was discussed privately at that
meeting with a small group. But I do remember that meeting.

You see, Clark did much of his work at home. He had an

expanded home this magnificent view over the bay. His wife, of
course, was badly crippled with arthritic conditions. She could
barely get around. It was a sad situation to see her. She s
such a beautiful person, such a wonderful, active person. She
was in Save the Bay activity with Sylvia Mclaughlin and so on.
He had a large area where you could entertain. It was wonderful
to have this meeting. It was a historic meeting in many
respects. It was his last meeting of that type.

"Fired with enthusiasm," as he used to joke. The same way

he came to the campus. He and I really didn t have any arguments
about Engineering because years later not too many years ago,
Clark Kerr made a point of honoring the four people he thought
were the builders of the Berkeley campus. These were people like
Lincoln Constance, L & S; and Ewald Grether who was the dean of
business administration; and Mike O Brien, dean of Engineering;
and Harry Wellman of Agriculture. He really honored Mike. In my
discussions with Clark in more recent years, I remember him
saying, "Inever realized how important Mike was, how good he
was. He was ahead of his time." Saying things like that.

Maslach s Achievement in Building Faculty Appointments,

Advancements

Maslach: Now, along the same way, remember I mentioned building up the
rate at which our appointments and advancements were approved at
the chancellor s office. [Glenn] Seaborg, who was the chancellor
after Kerr, before Strongwhen he came back from the Atomic
Energy Commission, I used to meet with him at the Faculty Club.
I used to sit often at the Chemistry table. I remember Glenn

telling me. He said, "You know, when I got to the AEC, I found
out how good engineering at Berkeley was." I said, "Yes, you
guys were knocking down our appointments all the time."

We laughed about it at that point because I had already been

able to build up our appointment rating level. When I left the
deanship, as I told you, we were getting 90, 95 percent approval
of all of our appointments and promotions.

Swent : This is a function of how many you asked for, too, isn t it?
 316

Maslach: True. At the beginning, I would not send cases that I thought
were weak, and people would disagree with me. A chairman would
say, "Look, I think he s strong; you think he s weak." I said,
"Look, here are the rules." And I d read them out from the
Academic Personnel Manual, which I then had. I had my own copy,
which I kept right on my desk. It was like a Bible. I said, "I

am required, when I forward the case to the chancellor, to put

down my opinion on this case. Now, do you want me to express my
opinion, which I ve expressed to you, to the chancellor? If that
case goes to the budget committee and that goes to the ad hoc
committees, who will rule on this."

yes.
"Oh, Well, okay, I ll take it back. I ll resubmit
it. [chuckles]

And so at the beginning, believe it or not, I was turning

down about 35 percent of the cases that were submitted to me as
dean. We were not sending poor cases forward. Part of our
problem was our own. We just had poorly prepared cases. It
wasn t until I wrote the manual for the preparation of cases that
we had a uniformity in preparation of cases. The budget
committee chairman asked me for a copy of that manual, and he
gave it to other deans [chuckles).

In many respects, I look upon my activity in changing that

ratio and the bringing in of facultynot me, personally, but
giving the chairmen the budgetary wherewithal to go out and
recruit top faculty--! think that was my greatest contribution to
the college, was the increase of curricular and graduate work,
and to get those faculty. That, to me, was the most important
thing I did at that time. Getting buildings and other things
working with students was all part of it, but the best thing, of
course, was the faculty.

Activities with Students and the Engineers Joint Council

Maslach: I want to kind of end this FSM period by pointing out what
happened there with regard to myself and the students. I was

always active with the students. I set up in my time various

ways to meet with students. Engineers Joint council, which is a
composition of all these student groupsthe professional groups,
like the ASME [American Society of Mechanical Engineers]
students, the Society of Civil Engineering studentsbut then
they have also their other groups, which they, themselves, want.
They re not part of a national scene. So there were about a
dozen societies.
 317

Swent :
May I just ask one quick question?

Maslach: Yes .

Swent : I noticed that you joined some of these societies later. Tau
Beta Pi?

Maslach: Well, Tau Beta Pi, they incorporated me. That s an honor society
that I did not get as a student

Swent : But that came later?

Maslach: Sigma Xi also. That s an honor society, really.

Swent : But you didn t get those as a student.

Maslach: No. got those because

I I was the dean, That s a good point. I
forgot to say that.

Swent :
They suddenly pop up when you re

Maslach: That s what I was saying. When I became dean, all of sudden all
these things happen, because I m dean--not because I m George
Maslach. I m dean. So they re really honors to the college in
that regard.

But when the students had the FSM period thrust upon them,
all kinds of things happened. The students had offices--EJC had
its office on the other side of campus, in the student building.
We had other groups who were there. For examplenot
engineering, but the choir, the music societies, the band, the
jazz band they had offices over there.

Swent : Over there. You mean the other end of the campus from the
Engineering.

Maslach: On the south side. There s a big line of demarcation if you look
at this campus, and that is University Way, going right up and
down the campus. Most of the professional schools and colleges
are north and a few south; most of L & S is south, a couple of
them are northwhich, incidentally, was the brainchild of Clark
Kerr, to kind of try to mix the campus. The theory was always
found humorous by the people who were against it. They used to
call it the theory of the faculty meeting in the men s room.

As an example, there were no voting booths north of the

campus for student voting. They were all south of the campus.
The one closest to us was on the north side of the library. All
of a sudden, when the activists took over control of the ASUC
 318

[Associated Students of the University of California] all of,

these groups were shoved out of their of f ices literally ,

brutally, nowout out now.

, So the EJC was just dumfounded--
what are we going to do?

They came to me. This was one of my strange space problems.

I said, ll
"I
try to find space." I looked around, looked
around. I found a lot of little places, but 1 found nothing

really very good. And then I found, through my campus space

people, a wonderful room, unknown to almost everyone, in the
upper levels of the old architecture building, which is now
Northgate Hall, journalism. Upstairs there s a room, believe it
or not. I challenge you to find the stairway to get there! So
this room was up for grabs, so I grabbed it. EJC loved it. It
was like one of those little attic places, like a little warren,
where all the kids would get together and talk. It was just
perfect for them. It was just marvelous the way that room and
the crisis of being thrown out of their office brought the EJC
together. They were really kind of angry at what had happened to
them over on the south side, and they were moving ahead.

I used to go up there and meet with them. It was a lot more

comfortable to meet there than in my office. I had a theory to

go out to meet on people s turf, not just bring them into my

turf. Bringing people into my turf meant that I was angry at
something or there was a real crisis or something, so I tried to
low-key it.

One of the groups that was shoved out was Cal[ifornia]

Engineer, the magazine put out by the California] Engineering
Society. I wondered what the heck we could be doing. The Cal

Engineer- -they needed room and so on. At the same time, I

learned that I had an alumni society. I was called by Bob
Andreasen of Standard Oil Company. There are two Bob Andreasens,
incidentally in the Engineering Alumni Society, northern Bob; and
southern Bob.

The Engineering Alumni Society

Maslach: Bob called me up and said--we were graduated, incidentally, in

the same year. So, "Hey, George, what do you think of having an
alumni society?" I said I thought that s a great idea. How do
we do it? What do we have to do? He said, "You ve got one."
And there was this society, formed about three years earlier. I
didn t know about it. It was very small, the Engineering Alumni
 319

Society. I couldn t believe this. "So let s get the officers

together on this thing."

I said, "Okay. Let me host a dinner at the Faculty Club."

That was great. We had the officers there, and I knew some of
them; others I did not know.

What had happened was that the society in the first couple
of years was just building up and getting a list of people and
stuff like that. Then one of--the third president died, in
office, and so the thing just went dormant. There was a general
feeling amongst people against Berkeley campus, FSM, and so on.
m not going to contribute another dollar until you clean up
"I

that mess at Berkeley." That s what we were hearing. Some good

friends of mine.

So we had this meeting.

All of a sudden, I found we had a
great alumni society, just wonderful. We used to meet regularly.
After a while, the Faculty Club was the place, and Dave Brown was
in charge of providing a box of liquor because the Faculty Club
did not have a liquor license, and we would get set ups--glasses
and ice--and we would meet in one of the private rooms and keep
down the noise [chuckles], and we just had this wonderful
relationship.

Increasing the Subscriptions of California Engineer

Maslach: I ll speak more of the Alumni Society, but I brought it in at

this point because just about the time we were revitalizing the
society, Cal Engineer was facing bad times. We met with Cal
Engineer editors. I had the idea, "Hey, what you need is larger
subscription." They did not have many subscriptions. They sold
it. They sold a lot, of course, in engineering. But I said,
ve got the Alumni Society.
"We How about the Alumni Society
coming up with the money for subscriptionsevery member of the
Alumni Society."

The Alumni Society thought that was the greatest idea I ve

ever had. So all of a sudden, the Cal Engineer, which had a
small two hundred subscriptionshad thousands of subscribers.
Overnight, they went from being bankrupt to going full steam.
And so in this way the dean s office was the catalyst.

It so happened that all these things were happening at the

same time, believe it or not. You can t believe that the
juxtaposition of all these problems--
 320

II

Swent: You were just saying the juxtaposition of all these problems and
the solution to them.

Maslach: It became a wonderful opportunity. In every crisis there was an

opportunity.

Swent: And you were also open to

Changing ASUC by Getting Voting Booths on the North Side of

Campus

Maslach: I got fed up with this damn lack of political representation over
here in Engineering, which was due simply to the fact that there
were no voting booths. I got hold of the committee at ASUC--in

charge of votingand I complained mightily. They pay these

people to operate these booths. They said they did not have the
money in the budget

Swent: These are the student elections.

Maslach: Yes, student elections. I said, "Okay, I ll put up the money.

You put up a booth in the Engineering courtyard, and you put
another booth down at Northgate"--which was an entrance. They
had several booths set up in the south side. And I said, ll
"I

pop for it, whatever it costs." Well, I put up the money for the
poll watchers, essentially, and the woman that sat there and gave
out the ballots and you went in and marked them up.

It was amazing what that did. Some of the students here on

this side of the campus--! m not talking just Engineering Social
Welfare, Agriculturewe set up a booth down there later. I paid
for this. I remember they set up a booth over there in
Environmental Design, up there at College and Bancroft. We had
changed immediately the whole voting pattern of the ASUC, which
up to this time had been basicallythe ASUC was an L & S
organization, when you got right down to it.

Not too many years ago and, in fact, a few years after we
got our booths, there was a political party. It was the
Engineering Science Party. They dominated ASUC for a number of
years. We got out the vote because we had the booths right
there, and I was telling the EJC people, "Hey, we ve got to get
out that vote." It was the only way to get moving in politics,
to get out the vote. Boy, we got out the vote, and so we changed
 321

many of the things that happened here, in the aftermath of the

FSM period.

If you look at it, we had the faculty of the college heading

up committees in the Academic Senate, and we had students being
active in the ASUC. It was really quite a change. And it all
came out of that FSM period of turmoil--one of the good things.
This campus became more of a university in many, many respects.

The student groups have flourished, Cal Engineering has

flourished, and the Alumni Society has flourished. I take no
credit for the Alumni Society; they were already organized
bef ore--

Swent : You are given credit for that.

Maslach: I revitalized them by my enthusiasm for their activities. Today

we have a much larger Alumni Society. In the beginning, first
year that I was dean and they were meeting here at the Faculty
Club, they gave us one thousand dollars for discretionary funds,
to be used by the dean. Nowadays they give ten million. It s a
major fundraising organization for Engineering. And that is just
part of the whole Engineering fundraising operation.

Swent: That s something we haven t even touched.

Maslach: No, we ll have to get on to that, too.

Swent: That has been a big change.

Maslach: During this whole period, before I left the deanship, there were
other momentous activities. Clark Kerr had proposed and the
Regents adopted a concept of going on a quarter system. In 66
we went onto the quarter system. I d like to single out John

Weyhausen, whom I mentioned earlier, Naval Architecture. He was

the chairman of our committee to transform us from a semester to
a quarter operation, and also a member of the campus committee,
responsible for the entire campus. John is so competent and
creative. I was always worried about how each course had to be
reviewed and restructured and so on.

I got into this whole thing in the beginning because I saw

here an opportunity to check off that third mark of things that I
was supposed to do for Ed Strong. We were already now, by 66,
recognized as the number two, say, in the nation in engineering,
and we were getting better; and we had already gotten lots of
people into the Academic Senate. I had been chipping away on
this problem of the 120-unit, semester-unit curriculum for the
bachelor s degree.
 322

One night I suddenly realized--! couldn t sleep that well

that night. Something was on my mind. If I cannot blank my mind
(which I can, and 1 immediately go to sleep), I ve got to get rid
of that thing up there. So it was an idea. Basically, it was
why don t we, when we reorganize each course, we restructure the
curriculum, we move from 120 to 180 quarter credits. Cut down
from the 138 semester units that we needed for that four-and-a-
half-year degree. Let s do it in concert, everybody.

My concept was and this is what I was dreaming aboutthat

any course would drop a little piece of its course, and the
aggregate of what we dropped out when we cleaned up all these
courses would amount to the difference in the number of units.
For example, in mechanical engineering and in civil engineering
there are three courses that teach essentially the same thing-
one little area. Well, if two of them dropped it and one had the
primary responsibility, why, guess what: You ve got so many
semester hours of free time.

So we went into this restructuring thing with the whole

concept of--I made it a decanal order; it was from one of my
retreats. I just arbitrarily set it. I had a hell of a lot of
chutzpa, but I got away with it! We had this dean s coordinating
advisory committee council, and 1 said, "There s just no way we
can do it piecemeal. We ve got to do it all at one time.
Everybody can drop their stuff, and no one will notice the
clatter of this stuff hitting the floor." Everybody laughed and
said, Okay, okay. We achieved in our restructuring in 1966 a
true four-year curriculum. That was really quite something.

Swent: You did it just sort of by analysis.

Maslach: Well, analysis first. I could see lots of stuff that could be

dropped, and then I also did it by brute force, saying, re "We

going to do it." And then 1 got a lot of agreement because, you

see, you could talk to, say, electrical engineers and say, One of
the things we ought to do in the lower division, we ought to cut
back on the graphics curriculum. That was pretty well in the
mind of everybody. But, boy, they loved that concept. They had
gotten their course in there, Engineering 17, and they felt
pretty good. But they thought that other stuff was outmoded and
outdated, so we did it kind of by agreement and threat.

Remember, I told you a guy from Caltech told me, sit

"I

around a cocktail table with a full bottle of bourbon, and by the

time that bottle was empty, we achieved our commitment." Well, I
never did it quite that way, but I did spend a lot of time going
around to each unit, each department, talking about their
 323

problems. There was a lot of out-of-the-of f ice politicking.

Academic politicking is what it was .

Swent : I think we re a few minutes before twelve. Maybe we ought to

stop.

Maslach: What I want to take up I ll give you a teaser on this is that I

want to complete this outline deanship, and I ll try to culminate
the whole deanship concept afterwards, but there s one more
thread here which is very important, which I have mentioned but I
have not elaborated on. It s basically my political instincts.
This has been important all my life without my even knowing it.

In 1959, as I told you earlier, I was fortunate very

casually to meet Jack Kennedy and his brother, Ted, when they
were here and were running in a motorcadeDoris and I--for
Kennedy and "Sparky" Avakian, who was a judge in the local area.
"

I think he was a judge at that time. It might have been when he

was a member of the school board. But anyway, it was a joint
motorcade through the city of Berkeley with Jack Kennedy. Ted
Kennedy was in his office, and I met him at that time.

Well, that was nothing that I would have dreamt would have
led to a lot of the activity that I got into, in part because of
being in Washington. That s the other thread in this whole
network. I was going to Washington so much, first technically
and next as dean, and then as member of all these committees. I
was on committee after committee. I overdid it; there s no
question. I said no to a lot, but I did overdo it in terms of
the amount of time I lost with my family and the amount of time I
lost in terms of doing research in the field of upper air
dynamics--raref ied gas dynamics is the best term.

I developed a whole political life, in which I met all kinds

of people all over the world and was influential, or at least
participated in, all kinds of decisions that I never could have
expected. For example, I was involved in the Vietnam peace
treaty.

Swent: Were you really?

Maslach: These are the kinds of things you can say, "Wait a minute. What
were you doing there? How the hell did you get there?"
[chuckles]

Swent: It sounds as if you enjoyed it, though.

Maslach: Well, I enjoyed a lot of it. But it s a life in which I went

through and I met people and I could evaluate them, and I have
 324

new feelings towards them For example, I worked like a dog to

try to get Adlai Stevenson the presidency. I spent days--I mean,
a full day, from early morning till late at night, taking people
to voting booths. Later, when I went back to look at the voting
records of that precinct, I found out I was doing nothing but
taking people over there to vote for Eisenhower. In one precinct
there, I probably took thirty, forty people, and that precinct
was about 150 votes, and the number of Stevenson votes was, like,
five. So I helped Eisenhower [chuckles] in that regard. But I
had to learn, you know, about this whole political mess. But
that s a whole new area.

It impinges upon the college work and the activity of the

college. Don t get me wrong. And kind of is a prelude in many
respects to the work at the chancellor s level, the provost
level. It s part of the whole thing. It had a big effect on a
number of things within the college. So that s when I got
started .

Okay. Call it quits.

Political Aspects

[Interview 8: February 18, 1999]

Swent: This is Eleanor Swent, and we re continuing the interview with

George Maslach on February 18th, 1999. This is the eighth
interview, Tape #21, so we re coming right along.

Maslach: We ought to step up the pace maybe.

Swent : No--

Maslach: At least finish it up. But we are getting pretty far along on my
life history here.

Swent : Yes.

Maslach: Today I d like to start by saying that this is another

coincidence that relates to this oral history. Yesterday I
started thinking about the political role I played while dean and
provost, and I want to start out by mentioning a few names in my
background when I was a kid.

One of them is a man by the name of Jeffrey Cohelan, best

known in Berkeley as a congressman. He and I were Boy Scouts in
 325

the same troop in San Francisco. He was the first Eagle Scout in
the troop, my brother was the second, and I was the third. It
seems so coincidental. Here I am, hours after reading this death
notice, and he s the man that I was going to start talking about.
The coincidence is getting too, too personal.

I did want to take one period of the interview session to

talk about this whole political activity I was engaged in and put
the hindsight of years of thinking about it--I m sort of able to
put it into perspective. I think there must be something

genetically that I inherited that made me be so political,

especially at the national scene. When 1 was a kid, as a family
we got to know the Mailliards. Bill Mailliard became a
congressman. I ve already related that to you in my oral

history, in which we used our daughter, Christina, as a model for

a Polish girl when he was running for his first term as
representative. And now here she is v a well-known professor of
psychology at Berkeley.

Swent : Christina, that is.

Maslach: During my father s activities in the political arenabecause he

was so prominent in the Polish insider clubs in Californiawe
would have letters from Franklin Roosevelt and Herbert Hoover,
asking for his support. Political activity was part of the whole
family scene. My mother was not active as much as my father. Of
course, it was nice to meet Paderewski when he came through on a
concert tour, because he was a Polish activist and premier at
that time of the Polish state.

I remember voting for Franklin Roosevelt for his fourth

term, That was my first national voting.
in Boston. It was
rather interesting because we also voted for a man who later
became a representative, in Boston, an Irish politician.

Making Changes in the Berkeley School Board

Maslach: But it wasn t until Doris and I came to Berkeley that we really
started getting politically active at the local level. We ran
campaigns for school board and city council. They changed the
school board from five to zero against us to five to zero for us,
and that s when people like Paul Sanazaro, Sparky Avakian, and
so on came into our life, because we were able to recruit them to
work and run for the school board.
 326

Vic Bottari, incidentally, was one of the people we defeated

in the school board race. He had been a long-time member of the
Berkeley school board, a former football hero here at UC Berkeley
when we were in school, All-American football player.

Swent : You said for and against us. What was your agenda?

Maslach: The agenda of the school board up to that time was very, very
conservative. The main first thing that we were interested in
was increasing the budget. School board members at the time did
not want to increase the budget and therefore the taxes, so we
ran a campaign for increasing the taxes. Our measures were given
the initials N and 0. And so in their campaign literature, they
would say, "Vote no on NO." Of course, in our campaign
literature, we pushed, "Vote yes on NO," which sort of gave it a
little twist.

Doris is really the one that worked on it. In those days,

we didn t have women s liberation yet. For example, in the
Emerson School PTA, the presidency of the PTA was shared, a
couple, and so the man and the wife would be co-presidents.

We were very successful in that first campaign and passed

the measure immediately, with I think 85 percent of the vote for
us.

Swent: What kinds of things did you do when you say you ran the
campaign? What kind of thing were you doing?

Maslach: The main thing is--in fact, she is still running campaigns. Just
this last year, for rent board people. But it s a matter of
doing all kinds of little minutiae, including the paperwork of
getting on the ballot, getting sponsors, which would be then
printed on the ballotsbecause the sponsors names are very
important. 1, for example, always look at sponsors names before
I vote for someone. The enemy of my enemy is my friend, you
might say. Actually, I look positively on the sponsors list.

Then there is, of course, fund raising. None of these

campaigns come cheap. Even a school board membership, why,
you re talking today probably fifty thousand. There are people
who do this as a job. There are other people who prepare
material for the campaignthe posters you see on the telephone
poles and everything else, all kinds of mailings.

Iremember once, 1 was dean of engineering, and I was

involved in a campaign, probably a school board campaign, and in
a brown, unmarked envelope came a printout of tabs for mailing
purposes someone who had access to the mailing facilities of the
 327

University of California. These were all the tabs for the city
of Berkeley--staf f and faculty. There it was. Just a roll.

Swent: Like a label?

Maslach: Yes, like a label which you put onto an envelope. It s a great
time-saver. The only thing was it was implicating because there
is a code number which had to be trimmed off with scissors
[chuckles] before we put it on the envelope. Of course, these
were not necessarily voters, so the whole thing had to be checked
against the voter registration list. But it was a valuable thing
that came through the mail, totally anonymous. But I was pretty
well known on campus for these activities.

1 was also, of course, knownas I ve told you, because I

was dean of engineering to get out the vote of the faculty on
Academic Senate meetings. For a while, I did it, you know,
without any grumbling, but a couple of times I was very put out
by the attitude of people who would call me up these were
liberals from the College of Letters and Science urging me to
get out the vote. I told off one of them. I said, feel
"1

whenever I get a call from you that all you re going to do is ask
me to do something. And I m getting tired of your telling me
what I should do. I know what to do." I don t think we ever
talked to each other again after this.

Political Contacts at the National Level

Professor Richard Folsom

Maslach: But the big thing in terms of political activity was at the
national scene. First, Dick Folsom, who had been a professor
here at Berkeley, had gone to Michigan, where he was head of the
Institute of Engineering Research. I was his counterpart here at
Berkeley for a number of years. But Michigan had a much larger
operation. After that, he left Michigan and went to Rensselaer
Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York.

He recommended me to be on the Annapolis advisory board

this is the academic advisory board. I spent a career with the
navy ten years on the Annapolis [U.S. Naval Academy] board, five
years during which time I was chairman, and later ten years on
the Academic Advisory Board of the Naval Postgraduate School at
Monterey, five years of which I was chairman. Twenty years of
 328

service on committees sounds like an awful lot. It was, but it

was great fun.

Swent : Was there any pay involved?

Maslach: No pay involved at all.

Swent: They paid your expenses?

Maslach: The navy did a good job. Of course, they would pick up your
expenses and travel and so on, but in Monterey, for example, the
navy school is headquartered in the old Del Monte Hotel, and a
number of the rooms were maintained--wood-paneled suites, really.
And I recall Doris and I would go down and stay in these suites.
While she visited other people, I was working on the board.

In fact, Jeff Cohelan was on one of those boards with me for

a number of years, so we would see Jeff when we were down there
as well.

Admiral Starr King

Maslach: But in Annapolis, they had you staying in the homes of captains
on the faculty. I met a number of the faculty people there,

including a wonderful man who later went on to admiral, who was

Starr King. Of course, that s a famous name here in California
history, and I have climbed Mt Starr King in Yosemite.
.

So I started to meet people intimately in this way. My

activities with the naval board at Annapolis was in getting
computers into the curriculum. I went to their so-called

computer center, which was a very small computer which today

would register nothing on a scale of one. [chuckles]

Herbert Holloman

Maslach: At the same time, Earl Parker had a friend by the name of Herbert
Holloman. Herbert Holloman was assistant secretary of commerce,
Department of Commerce. Parker recommended me to Holloman, to be
a member of what was called the Commerce Technical Advisory
Board. Right off the bat, here I am involved with two committees
in Washingtonin the area, that is--and I was meeting all kinds
of people, right and left, including political people. The
 329

Commerce Technical Advisory Board was loaded with executives of

major corporations banks and what have you, people from New
York--I remember Princeton University being represented and
Harvard and so on.

And then the same thing occurred on the Naval Academic

Advisory Board. We had big names from corporations as well as
alumni who were very successful, alumni from Annapolis. And we
had a number of admirals who were just retired, for example. So
we had a very broad representation of people. Every one of them
had a big background, and they had a lot of influence. This is
what I recall.

Admiral William R. Smedberg

Maslach: One of the nicer things, on the naval board was one of the
admirals, Admiral Smedberg. There is a Smedberg Lake, close to
Mt Conness, the Tuolomne Meadows area in Yosemite.
. I said,
"Gee, I ve been at Smedberg Lake." And he just couldn t believe
it. Actually, his grandfather, who was a surveyor for the U.S.
Coast and Geodetic Survey, and was on the original survey of the
state of California. One of the triangulation points is Mt .

Conness. I have actually climbed Conness, and you can see where

they had their camp. There s a remnant of glacier up there at

least a big snow pile that never melts and then you can see the
marker of the U.S. Geodetic Survey.

It s kind of scary to get over to that marker because it s

on a peak point that the granite has eroded, so as you step from
the mountain proper onto this slightly separated peak, you can
look down on one side or the other, and it s at least a thousand-
foot fall, and it s just a narrow thing, and you have to cross a
gap of about a foot or eighteen inches. So you don t do it
casually [chuckles].

Anyway, Smedberg and I became close friends and, of course,

the other admirals. The top admiral we had was a man by the name
of Rivero, "Rivets" Rivero, they called him, because he was quite
short. Some people claimed he was under the legal limit, but he
went to Annapolis, and he was an admiral the top level, four-
star.

I then, of course, automatically got acquainted with cabinet

members through Commerce and navy and cabinet members of the navy
board. In Commerce, Herb was a very dynamic person. A tragic
death. He was partially paralyzed many years later and he
 330

retired into work at MIT, but he was a very creative person with
lots of ideas. His was a very active committee. I think I was
going there regularly, every month. So that s what started me
flying back and forth very actively.

Paul Nitze

Maslach: I met through the navy Paul Nitze, a well-known secretary of the

navy, who then went on to a distinguished career in developing

peace. I didn t realize our careers would cross back and forth,
but they did. I always thought that one of the things that I was
interested in doing in the Washington scene was working with Paul
because he did an awful lot in nuclear treaties and other kinds
of non-State Department type peacekeeping missions. His name
will go down in history as one of the leaders in this field.

Swent : Was he a scientist or an engineer, as well?

Maslach: No. His background was law. I was always very impressed with
him. He was there when I made my first talk before the board
about the need to work in the field of computers, and that
impressed him mightily. He, in fact, pushed for years that 1
should become secretary of navy. I would always say yes, yes,
but I really--

John Warner

Maslach: I also met John Warner, who was secretary of the navy after Paul
Nitze. John is senator in the federal government today. You see
him, a rugged fellow--big shock of steel-grey hair. And was best
knownfor a while, he was married to Elizabeth Taylor
[chuckles]. He was another one who was constantly pushing me to
be secretary of the navy.

Swent: Were you tempted at all?

Maslach: Well, it will come out later that I was tempted in a lot of ways,
but not really with the navy secretaryship. It s sort of a
backwater, dead-end, very valuable, but not the political
activity as much as it is a maintenance of an ongoing activity.
 331

McGeorge Bundy and Ford Foundation

Maslach: [McGeorge] Bundy, who was chief of staff for Kennedy and
"Mac"

was later in the Johnson administration- -he went on to head up

the Ford Foundation. He also used me in a variety of committees.
For a while, I was going to the Ford Foundation and New York
City, on 42nd Street, just down from Grand Central a very
convenient location. They always did things up in true style.
The meals that we had at the Ford Foundation were gourmet meals
that you could not believe. There were waiters in dress outfits;
just amazing. It was all catered, of course. Or some of it was
Ford Foundation staff, for the coffee breaks and stuff like that,
but it was really a beautiful building and a beautiful group of
people to work for.

One of the things I remember is that at that time, first-

class seats there was no business classwere available from
Washington, D.C. to San Francisco at about twenty-five dollars
over the price of what we called steerage. You would race into
the airport at Dulles, put in your tickets, and say, "Are there
seats in first class?" If there were, why, you would pay the
twenty-five dollars out of your pocket, because you got a much
better meal, and the drinks were free [chuckles].

S . I .
Hayakawa

Maslach: One of the times I got in there, and my seatmate was S. I.

Hayakawa, who was at that time president of San Francisco State
University and best known for his tarn o shanter and his ripping
the wires out of a loudspeaker system, stopping a demonstration
at San Francisco State. Someone was sitting next to him in my
seat and talking with him, congratulating him, obviously. I
waited, and I sat down and introduced myself. San Francisco
State or at least he did not have a good opinion of Berkeley.
It might be just an institutional rivalry, but it might have also
been personal.

So he started asking me because I introduced myself as an

aeronautical engineer and dean he asked me what this was on the
plane outside on the wings. They have these little shapes that
come up out of the wing that are called spoilers, and so I had to
explain that and fluid mechanics in terms of why they were there.
I was explaining other things. We were flying alongan
overcast, a stormy day, and I could see the front ahead of us. I
said one of the reasons I took this airline and I think it was
 332

Unitedis that TWA went first, and they have to report the
weather.

pointed out I was a consultant for the Federal Aviation

I
Administration, and whenever something happened on a flight, I
was to report what had happened, for the investigation if there
were some damages or whatever. I remember telling him to sit

upright and lightly, and through his buttocks he could feel the
automatic pilot, because it goes left for a second and then goes
right for a second, and you could feel--the whole plane kind of
moves a little, and you have to be alert to it. This was part of
the expression "flying by the seat of your pants." It s a little
more technical, but people still use that expression.

said, "The pilot will get a change in altitude, and he ll

I

report this front, and he ll get the record from the flight in
front of him." 1 kept looking, and this front was getting closer
and closer, so I finished my drink, tightened my seat belt, and
told him to do the same thing. I said, re going to have a
"We

little rough weather." He didn t pay any attention to me. We

hit that front head-on. It was on automatic pilot the entire
time. I can t understand it. Anyway, the plane dropped about
6000 feet, straight down, flat. In front of me there were these
glasses of liquor and water and what have you, just floating up
theremore than an acceleration of gravity, and the cart with
the liquor was just people were screaming. People were getting
thrown into the aisles because they did not have their seat belts
on. They had been told, maybe, but they didn t do it. It was a
royal mess.

the people picked everything up and started

Of course,
putting things back together the stewardesses and so on and
then the copilot came out, and I pulled my wallet out and I held
up my FAA card, and he just, "[making groaning sound] "--because
he knew that I would be reporting. I turned to Hayakawa. He was
drinking bourbon, straight, with a glass of water on the side.
He had this glass of water with bourbon all over him. Of course,
they came through later with vouchers for cleaning and stuff like
that.

When I came into San Francisco, the FAA were there to meet
me, and I went up and reported what had happened. Hayakawa s
only remark to me, I think, for the rest of the trip was, "Why
the hell aren t you flying this plane?" [laughter]
 333

Bill Mailliard and Byron Rumford

Maslach: But you meet people, of course, coming back and forth. Sometimes
I d see Bill Mailliard coming home to his district. Byron
Rumford was a man that was in the state legislature but then
also, later, in the Congress. He was a constant flyer. I would
see him, and whenever we saw each other, we would always get
seats together because we had a lot to talk about, Rumford being
well known for his housing acts here and also the labor act for
the state of California, which was copied widely throughout the
United States.

Work with the Ford Foundation

Swent : What were you doing for the Ford Foundation? What was that
connection?

Maslach: They had me in for a couple of things. The first thing is that
we at Berkeley had a grant that s why I became dean--to help the
Universidad Catolica in Chile and to build it up. We did a very
fine job there. I had very little to do with it. I never went
down to visit, although I could have something I regret today,
but--we had a very active program, with faculty down there. The
university ended as a first-class institution in the technical
sense. We re talking about engineering.

Then we also, later on--and this I was involved in at the

beginning had an international program with the Ford Foundation
in India. India was involved with the building of four major
universities one developed by the government of India itself;
another, by the Russian government; another, by the British
government; and another, by the United States government. The
Ford Foundation was central to this, was to be the operator.

It was a wonderful program probably never will be

duplicated because we had, I think, twelve to fifteen major
universities involved, and Berkeley was one of them. Here you
have in the Midwest major universities like Michigan and in the
East, MIT, and the West, UC Berkeley also a lot of others:
Colorado and you had the School of Mines in South Dakota and so
on. All these universities pledged to send a certain number of
faculty to teach there. The minimum time was one year, maybe
two-year stints.
 334

This was a fantastic program, very similar to the program

with this one university here at Berkeley, working in Indonesia.
I think I talked about that earlier, several hours ago. Just to
keep the record straight, I ll just mention it. Before becoming
dean--in fact, before becoming a tenured professor, I worked in
the development of a program for UC Berkeley to help the
University of Bandung.

Swent : I don t believe we talked about that.

Maslach: We haven t talked about that?

Swent: I don t think so.

Maslach: It would have changed my life if the program had gone through,
but at the last minute, the government federal government, that
iswanted a clause in the contract which would require all
correspondence and all reportingespecially reporting to be
reviewed by them. In other words, they had a censor on whatever
reports we made. We simply, as a university, could not take
that, and we pointed out that s contrary to our standards, and
that s it. It got to be kind of heated. We just walked away
from the contract, after having done all the paperwork.

The University of Kentucky came in, I think the federal

government found them, and they just took over. They took
everything. They apologized because they knew that they had
agreed to allow this censorship. They took over that program at
Bandung, which is a major and very good university in Indonesia.

The federal government later changed its mind on that

clause, and UC San Francisco, for example, ran a very fine
program in pharmacology at Jakarta. And UCLA ran an engineering
program in Yogyakarta, which is halfway down the island, towards
Bali.

This was my first contact with foreign programs, but it was

a failure. But I was really front man out in Jakarta and in
Bandung. And Howard Eberhart, who was the co-worker with me on
developing this whole program, was to be the man here in Berkeley
recruiting faculty to go to Indonesia.

Swent: It was just an exchange of faculty, not of students?

Maslach: Not of students, no. I had a lot of contact with the Ford
Foundation. They obviously liked what I did, so I was on an
international program committee, and later I was on an
engineering within the United States committee. So I got to
know Bundy quite well. I always remember he had that broad
 335

Harvard accent. When he said, "Just call me Mac," it came out

sounding almost like Mike [chuckles]. I looked at him twice
before I realized it was just his accent I couldn t understand,

But things developed. For example

Maslach: But things developed, just by themselves. Just the normal

sequence of events in the Washington area, you meet people right
and left. For example, the Commerce Technical Advisory Board had
done quite a bit with the electrical automobile and air pollution
and had done other things on cleaning up the landscape of the
United States pushing a variety of purchasing programs.
Holloman did this all the time.

For example, since the federal government buys thousands of

vehicles, okay, let s have a program in which so many of these
vehicles are experimental, for cutting down air pollution. The
purchase of jeeps for the Post Office, which was then a federal
office, was an example of where we did an awful lot of clean-up
of the air.

But one day, I remember coming back to Washington, and we

were told that in the af ternoon--this was a weekend, remember--we
had gone there on Friday and then worked all day Saturday and
Sunday but on Saturday afternoon, we were to go en masse to the
State Department auditorium and listen to Mrs. Lyndon Johnson
speak on her idea of beautifying America, something that she
really worked on for many, many years did a very good job.

President and Mrs. Lyndon Johnson

Maslach: I remember going there and having an almost front-row seat with
all these capitol people and so on. I was listening to her, and
I honest to God must tell you that I understood less than half of
what she said. She had such a thick Texan, Southern accent that
I really oh, it was horrible and this was obviously known. It
was pointed out at that time. I remember listening to a tape
afterwards, and it wasn t me it was everybody else, as well, who
had had this problem. If you did not come from the South, why,
it was a difficult problem. She went to voice school and
everything else and changed, and she s an outstanding speaker
today. I heard her later.
 336

But one of the benefits of this thing, of listening to this

speech, was we all got into the bus and went to the White House,
and we went through the security check, and there we are, out in
the Rose Garden, listening to the President [chuckles], so you
met the President. And I met the vice president somewhere,
Hubert Humphrey. You know, the Washington scene.

Swent : It must have been pretty exciting.

MaslacV It was fun. But I kind of overdid it because I was on an

Interior Department committee- -you saw the volume in my vitae. I
wrote the section on solid waste disposal for a report that is
still, today, valid and has a thousand or more ideas,
resolutions, of what should be done, that could be applied today.
A lot of it has been applied, of course, over the thirty years
since I did that. But it was not just solid waste. Mine was the
section on solid waste. The report is about an inch and a
quarter thick, and it covers air pollution and it covers water
pollution, as well.

Henry "Scoop"
Jackson and EPA

Maslach: That took a lot of time, but the people in Interior got to know
me, and that s how I met the botanist who worked with me on the
solid waste disposal. He introduced me to "Scoop" Jackson. And
that s how I got involved in helping write the legislation for
the Environmental Protection Agency. Scoop and I got to know
each other, and I was very impressed with him, a liberal
Republican who voted Democratic pretty much most of the time. He
was up in the state of Washington. We, of course, would talk
about the West Coast and so on. I was asked, kind of tenuously,
to be involved in the administration of the EPA, but I instead
recommended a man from Santa Barbara who was the second
administrator of the EPA, and I just stayed out of that.

Lee DuBridge

Swent: Was there any trickle-down of all this here to the university?

Maslach: One thing that I can honestly say there was a direct trickle-down
is in education, what you say when you talk in lectures, what you
say when you talk to the people in the university and the Faculty
Club and so on. Let me give you a very specific example. Later
 337

on, Lee DuBridge, science advisor to president [Richard M.

]

Nixon, asked me to be on a committee, which was to review whether

we should build an SST, supersonic transport. We came up with
"No, it should not be built."

Advisor on the Supersonic Transport; an Unworkable Airplane

Maslach: I wrote the section which dealt with the pollution of the
atmosphere. I was working in the field of upper atmosphere

aerodynamics, and I knew how few the molecules were up there.

Just cleaning up the exhaust products on the big aircraft would
be a real problem, and they were talking five hundred SSTs to be
built. Of course, it never occurred, except for the Concorde,
which was built by the British and the French, one of the great
financial and ecological disasters of this worldtruly an
unworkable airplane. It had a history of just remarkable bad
engineering.

The first nacelles did not fit the engines. The design of
the plane they could not extend the plane. It was all
curvatures. You could not carry passengers luggage during the
summertime. They would ship them with another flight which was
not supersonic, so the luggage would not come--or, if you took
the luggage, you could not fly that many people. This is during
the high-humidity months of the year.

The sonic boom problem, of course, limited how fast they

could go, and where. It could go supersonic only over the open
water. I see they re now talking about reviving the supersonic

transport in United States for flights to Australia because

you ve got a very long flight, or flights to China, a very long
flight. I hope we never do it because--

As an example, I was talking about this program at the

chemistry table of the Faculty Club, and the then-dean of
chemistry was Harold Johnston. I didn t know it, but he was the

atmospheric chemist, and he worked in the very field that we re

talking about. He said, "George, it s even worse than you
think." I was just thinking of particles and molecules that were
not going to react chemically. He said that the nitrogen oxides,
which are called NOX, reacted as a catalyst and destroyed the
ozone layer and made a hole, essentially. We have that hole down
over the South Pole. The reason it s over the South Pole, of
course, is because of the magnetic field of the earth.
 338

So Harold Johnston--! said, "Gee, I want you to come back

and tell these people." No one had ever mentioned this. I
didn t know it. So I got him onto a committee that was involved
in this pollution. He was the father of the study of this entire
ozone layer business. He, one night, working all night in
Washington, developed the equations and so on and presented them
in a technical meeting. Last year, at the Nobel Prize awards,
two members of the chemistry departments- -one U.S. and one in
Britain received the Nobel Prize for what they had done more
recently. Both of them, in their speeches, gave great credit to
Johnston. As far as I m concerned, he should have been a
receiver of the Nobel Prize. They should have split it three
ways. He s now retired.

Of course, with this as an example, I was able to use-- I

used Charlie Tobias on the electric car and air pollution,
because he was a world authority on batteries, and we all thought
that batteries were the thing to do with electric cars. It still
is, but battery development has been extremely slow.

I would use all kinds of people, right and left, and get
them involved in these things, if it was part of their research
activities. So yes, it did have a follow-up effect. And I had
talked, of course, with students. I had students that finally
ended up going to various agencies. So yes, there was a good,
positive effect.

Bob Wiegel, who was an associate dean for a while, said it

brilliantly many times: "All of the problems I get from my Ph.D.
students I get from my outside consulting or visits to industry."
And that was quite true. I have to admit the same thing. There
are many, many of these problems you had never heard about or
thought about until you actually sat down with other people in a
crossing of disciplines and doing these things.

Incidentally, after I was on that committee on the SST and

we voted that it should not be built, all hell broke loose.
Nixon kept the report secret, and then he was challenged by a
member of Congress, in a court casethis was an executive
privilege argument. The report was issued after the vote was
taken in the Senate on the SST. We had done a lot of campaigning
with senators and explained why it should not be built, and we
won by one vote. So the SST was never built.

Of course, we have all kinds of supersonic planes flying.

The military has all kinds of supersonic planes that hold all
kinds of world records for speed, so the supersonic transport was
not a novel, new idea. But I would get phone calls all day long
and in the middle of the night. This, of course, I was able to
 339

handle because way back in the beginning of our troubles with

FSM, this was the tactic students used. They would call up the
chancellor s home and calling deans. So I just asked Bell
Telephone to have a plug instead of a hard-wired telephone, and
the man said, that instrument belongs to us." I said, "The
"No,

minute you leave, I m cutting that cable." I knew how to do it

and put in a plug, a switch. He looked at me, and he put in the
plug [laughs]. Now, of course, the phone belongs to you, which
is what it should be.

Nomination as Director of the Environmental Protection Agency

Maslach: Getting back to the political thing, there were all kinds of
developments. I ll pass quickly to one because I had mentioned
the names. Lee DuBridge asked me to be the director of the EPA,
and I kind of didn t say No hard enough or fast enough, and so he
put my name up. I was approved by the Senate committee, etc.,
etc. And these posts carry a cabinet-level rating. These
directors of these agencies are essentially at the same salary
level as a cabinet member. So I was approved for everything.
Then we received the word, in a strange way, that I had been
turned down, and I had been turned down by Nixon. I was turned
down because I was a Democrat. I said, "Fine, that s the end of
that."

And then Lee DuBridge called Chancellor Heyns Chancellor.

Heyns was on the National Science Foundation board, and he felt

sure that DuBridge was calling him on NSF business. Just as the
call came through, a rock came through the chancellor s office
window. We were still having protests. These were kind of
surreptitious, fly-by-night type protests. You couldn t spot who
did it. But the chancellor s secretary said, were under the
"We

desk" [chuckles] when this phone call came through.

He answered the call and talked to DuBridge, and he was so

angry. He told me laterhe said, told DuBridge,
"I I don t

give a good goddamn what Maslach does. Basically, what

"

DuBridge was calling for [chuckles] was to ask Heyns to ask me to

take the position at a rate of pay lower than the cabinet rate,
which would mean a salary cut for here, and with the added
expenses in Washington--horrendous--and in that way we would
avoid presidential signature on appointment. I said, way." "No

And that was the end of that. So that s as close as I ever got
to taking on a federal government job. It was fun, thinking and
so on.
 340

The Chancellor s Shadow Cabinet

Maslach: One of the exciting times, which is not Washington-related

directly, occurred during my deanship. People are pretty
knowledgeable of the FSM movement and the disruption it had on
this campus. It terminated with the forced retirement of Ed
Strong as chancellor and the appointment of what was called by
the president of the Regents a shadow cabinet to help the acting
chancellor run the campus.

What happened to me was one day in the afternoon, early

afternoon, I received a telephone call from Ed Strong directly.
That was sort of odd, but I took the call. He asked me if I
could attend a meeting in Don Mclaughlin s house that afternoon.
I could come--I think it was three o clock. I said, "Sure." 1
said, "What s it all about? Don McLaughlin s house. Why are you
meeting there?" He told me that the Regents meeting, which had
passed--

Swent : Don was a regent at that time.

Maslach: Yes. This was in November. A lot of the FSM things had been
talked about, and they wanted to take some action in the December
meeting. This was a personnel action, so you could hold a secret
meeting without violating the Brown Act by the State of
California.

The funny and sad part of it was that for years I had wanted
to go to Yosemite Valley for the Christmas Bracebridge Dinner.
That of course went back, years, to Ansel Adams. And he, of
course, was the central figure in the Bracebridge Dinner skit
that s put on. He played the role of the squire. All this is in
costume, and it s in this beautiful dining room of the Ahwahnee
Hotel. Getting a ticket to that was pretty tough, but I had two
tickets for that Christmas.

Well, Regents meetings are around the third week of the

month, and I at the beginning of December was going to this
meeting at Don s house. I didn t realize that this would destroy
our entire vacation, and I would have to cancel the tickets. It
happened to be the year, incidentally, in which it was very
difficult to get into Yosemite, even on the all-weather road,
120, because there was a flood in the park itself. The valley
was half a lake. So the number of people who actually got to the
Bracebridge Dinner through this storm was pretty small. And a
number of people had to cancel for physical reasons.
 341

Ed Strong told me that the "shadow cabinet" concept had come

up in discussions and that he had agreed that he ought to have
more people throughout the faculty that would be advising him. I
kind of knew about this, and I knew who the people were. The
people that were going to be at that meeting were Martin
Meyerson, dean of the College of Environmental Design; Sandy
Elberg, graduate dean; Frank Newman, dean of the School of Law;
and I think there was one other person in there, who couldn t
make it but came later. He was from Business Administration.

I got to the Mclaughlin house, which I knew well, and I

walked to the door--knocked--rang the bell, whatever. I walked
in this little vestibule--it s a gracious house large To my .

left there was a step-down living room, and there was Clark Kerr
and Harry Wellman and a bunch of officials from University Hall.
And then, to my right, in the dining room was the Regents, in
meeting.

I started walking in, not knowing which way to go

[chuckles). I thought, "Obviously, I should be going over here."

And so Clark Kerr said, "Oh, no, no. You re not here." Don
McLaughlin said, "No, not here either, George. You re in the
library." I said, "Okay." So I walked straight ahead. There s
a little library, just a beautiful little roomall paneled
walls, with a wonderful view out over the bay sort of a library-
study.

I walk in, and there s Sandy Elberg sitting there.

Sandy
you have to know himalways had this feeling of being
overwrought and too many things happening. His favorite
statement to me, when I would be teasing him, would be, "Oh,
shush." [laughs] I walked into the room, and there he was.

"Oh, George, I m so glad to see you."

I said, "What s happening?"

"I don t know; I was just told to come."

A few minutes later, Martin Meyerson comes in, and Frank

Newman comes in, and we were kind of chatting. Frank said, "What
are we here for?"

I said, talked to Ed Strong when he called me," and it

"I

turned out that all these other people went to the secretary, and
the secretary said, "You re just supposed to be there." They
knew nothing. The secretary would never ask Ed Strong.
 342

So I told him that we were going to be the shadow cabinet

and that "you, Martin," were going to be the executivewhatever
--shadow-chancellor or whatever it was going to be. So we talked
about it amongst ourselves very quickly. Newman was not quite
sure it was such a great idea. You remember Frank Newman went on
to be on the Supreme Court of the State of California. Martin
Meyerson was quiet. And then Sandy just seemed to have no
concept of what we would do.

was just keeping an open mind and giving some "for-

I
on what this group might be asked to do.
instances" Well, this
meeting of the Regents was really quite traumatic. We sat in
that little room, but 1 learned afterwards some of the things
that happened outside. Ed Strong and Clark Kerr, [...], [...]
made their presentation to the meetings about this shadow
cabinet. Of course, we were trotted out and introduced as the
people. Then the Regents kind of broke up, and a lot of them
left.

The chairman of the Board of Regents spoke to us as a group

before we were introduced to the Regents, describing kind of what
he thought we would do.

Swent : Who was the chairman at that time?

Maslach: I ve got a block on his name, but he was the executive officer
for the May Company, a major commercial organization throughout
the West Coast states. He was a powerful regent and for many
years was the chairman- -very prominent, dominant figure. Anyway,
he outlined things, and they were all rather innocuous. We were
supposed to take jobs from Ed Strong and conduct surveys for him
and also for the Regents. The Regents felt a vacuum of knowledge
about this campus, and so a couple of regents were supposed to be
sort of contact points with this shadow cabinet and the
chancellor .

We nodded. After he spoke, why, then Clark Kerr came in and

gave us a short description of what he thought. I always
remember with great poignancy, because Clark Kerr was at the door
of the library, and Ed Strong was right behind him. Clark said,
"No, Ed, why don t you stay outside." He came and spoke to us
directly. That little scene just was imprinted on my mind. I
just knew at that point that Ed Strong was not going to be long
in the chancellor s position. There was no mention of this
anywhere.

We heard Clark Kerr speak, and then he asked me, as an

individual, to go down to his office after this meeting and meet
with him at his office.
 343

So we started breaking up, and people were leaving right and

left. I knew the house, and there was Don. I said, "Don, how
about a drink?"

He said, "You know where it is." So I went in the kitchen,

and there was the secretary to the Regents, a woman. She was
opening and closing cabinets in the kitchen.

I said, "What are you looking for? The booze?"

She said, "Yes, I need a drink." [chuckles] So I found the

liquor locker, and I put it up on the counter bourbon and Scotch
and whatever. I got the ice cubes, and then we stood there and
had a drink in the dark kitchen. Don came in, turned on the
lights, and he poured himself a drink [chuckles]. So it was kind
of a meeting in the kitchenthe Regents and everybody. It was
kind of an interesting way of sort of- relaxing from this
strenuous mental exercise we had gone through.

1 said goodbye, and then 1 drove down to Clark Kerr s

office. I, of course, had been there before, when 1 was
appointed as dean. He tried to give me kind of a broader, more
detailed understanding of what was happening. The reason that
they wanted the people that they wanted, that they had there, was
they felt the strength of the Berkeley campus and the stability
of the Berkeley campus rested with the professional schools and
colleges Engineering, Law, Business Administration, Regional
Design. To some degree, that was quite true. There was a little
more activism in Law and Regional Design, but Engineering and
Business Administration had pretty much been hands-off in a lot
of this activity.

I asked, "Who recommended us?" He said he asked Ed. In

fact, this was Ed s idea. I thought that was pretty good, and I

began to feel a little better about the whole operation. But I

still remember it was about f ive remember it s December, and
,

dusk comes pretty early. There were the two of us, sitting in
his beautiful office, without the lights on, just chatting back
and forth. I want to emphasize this is the same kind of
closeness, you know, that I felt with so many different people.
My memory of Ed Strong was sitting in his office, in a
comfortable chair, talking with himthe same thing here with
Clark Kerr.

My relations with Clark at times, I disagreed with things

he said and did, but in general we were both scholars of higher
education me to a much smaller degree than he and when we met
just six months to a year ago here on campus, why, we had such a
 3AA

cordial time in talking to each other. Obviously, we liked to

talk to each other about these various things.

Swent : When was this meeting?

Maslach: It was when Martin Meyerson became acting chancellor, when Strong
was taken out of the position.

Swent: Right after that.

Maslach: The December meeting.

Swent: At that same meeting?

Maslach: No. The meeting of the Regents formally, in public, was held--

Swent : Followed this meeting at Don s house.

Maslach: --about two weeks later.

Swent: We ll get that date somewhere.

Maslach: Oh, I m sure we can find it.

Swent: So this was just twilight in more than one way.

Maslach: Yes, really. Just sitting there, talking, and then I left. I
remember him not congratulating me but saying warm things about
the College of Engineering and how it was improving.

If I may just drop this for a moment, you have to constantly

remember here that Ed Strong gave me three jobs to do: one, to
have a true four-year curriculum, which occurred in 1966, when we
went to the quarter system; to get more faculty involved in the
Academic Senate, which steadily increased to the point where we
have dominated the Academic Senate chairs of all the committees,
practically; and third, to make the University of California the
best College of Engineering in the United States.

We were a distant second from the first year that I was dean
and in the first review that was made of academic organizations.

Maslach: I just made some statements about the ratings in the College of
Engineering. We were a close second five years after the first
ratings, which were about 1964.
 345

Swent: I think the Regents meeting we were speaking of must have been
December 64.

Maslach: It might have been 65.

Swent: Meyerson came in January 65, according to my time line.

Maslach: Okay, then that s when it was. The point I want to finish with
on the ratings is that years later, when Ernie Kuh was dean of
the College of Engineering, why, the best review ever, which was
done by the research councils of the federal governmentboth
science and engineering councils were involved--Cal, UC Berkeley
Engineering was rated number one. So the three things that I was
charged to do by Ed Strongtwo of them were pretty well finished
in a few years, and the third one was finished in about six,
sevenno, about eight years after I had taken the deanship and
that charge.

Anyway, 1 left that evening and went back home and related
all this to Doris. I talked about things, and suddenly, in the
next week, I was getting all kinds of jobs to do this and to do
that as part of the shadow cabinet. We operated out of the
chancellor s office. A key contact man was Errol Mauchlan, who
was the vice chancellor for financial affairs. He was Budget
and Planning, I believe was his title, vice chancellor. He
became kind of a member of this shadow cabinet. It was quite
nice because Frank Newman just never felt comfortable in this
position, and so he resigned, and Kragen, Adrian Kragen, took his
position. The man that couldn t make the meeting was the
Business Administration he came to later meetings.

We were charged to bring up a number of different things,

including the famous as I mentioned last t irae t ime place, and
"

manner" of holding protest meetings, and the use of the

microphones at Sproul Plaza things of this nature. We brought
up a lot of things, pulling materials from the Academic Senate
and also giving a philosophical note. It was interesting to see
that these reports were presented to the Regents and incorporated
in their minutes. Of course, this was done publicly, and these
reports were labeled by the name of the regent who presented the
report, but the report was our work. We never got, the authorship
straight on these reports, but we wrote them.

It was kind of nice to have a number of people writing these

reports because if you think about it, Meyerson was a great
speaker, orator. Of course, he wrote beautifully, too. Adrian
Kragen, as an attorney, wrote in more flowery terms. I m not a
bad writer. And Sandy Elberg was excellent. Mauchlan has a very
 346

British approach to his writing, So we had a lot of word artists

working on these reports.

We did a number of things of that nature. We were advisory.

But it started immediately. At one point, Doris and I made a
decision we couldn t go to Bracebridge Dinner. We gave it up
which I always regretted.

Swent: Too bad.

Maslach: Yes, it was too bad. But the Regents meeting in December was one
of the stormiest meetings. I m sure that in the confidential
meeting of the Regents which was held, Ed Strong gave a
statement he had it prepared, in mimeograph formand this
statement to the Regents was his personal position. It revealed
that he had a different viewpoint than the president, Clark Kerr,
and so he objected to a number of things. But he made it a
personal statement in a way that kind of demonstrated that he was
not in control. His viewpoint of the chancellorship should have
been his relationship to the president.

Swent : This is all in relation to the student protest.

Maslach: Yes, the movement. So at that point, I guess he either resigned

or was asked to resign. As I said, a very emotional meeting.
Somebody sent me a copy of that documenthis words. I was so

impressed negatively by it. I don t think I cried, but I must

say tears came to my eyes because I could see the end of that
tremendous career of a professor of philosophy who
philosophically had a viewpoint, and here he was, in an
administrative position where his philosophy really did not come
to bear. And so you have to maybe submerge your philosophy on
some of these things.

Swent: What was the specif ic

Maslach: He thought he could have worked things out with the students if
he did not have interference. I now want to give you a name that
I had forgotten last time. The vice chancellor was Alex
Sherriffs. He was a professor of psychology. He was vice
chancellor for Strong. I think that he was painted as the grey
eminence in this whole process. But all this occurs after the
third week. Strong is out. Meyerson was appointed at that same
meeting as an acting chancellor. Meyerson didn t know about the
secret meeting. He was kind of the de facto chairman of our
shadow cabinet.

This was great. I thought we could make some progress. I

felt that a lot of people would rethink their whole role in this
 347

protest movement, think more kindly of people such as Ed Strong.

But--

Swent : What do you think should have been done differently?

Maslach: Well, it s hard to say. I talked to Mario Savio at length during

these periods of time. I have great, great respect for the man.
He was a true intellectual, a scholar, and he was anti-violence.
Left the FSM when it became violent. I came and talked with him
at the bar down on San Pablo Avenue, where he later was a
bartender. He had his first child, with Goldberg, and the child
had Down s syndrome. It was so sad to see him holding this
child. Did not live very long. But it was a sad period there
for Savio.

It was also a sad period for a lot of other people because

the whole basic concept of the FSM was hard to argue with; and
that is the right of free speech but on political matters. I
mean, why can t a candidate for the president of the United
States be on this campus to speak to people that were going to
vote? So this whole use of the campus issue, which was the
fundamental issue, was handled very badly by everybody Strong,
students, faculty, regents, Clark Kerr--everybody There s .

enough blame on this whole period. Everybody walked away with a

piece of the blame. I don t think that the FSM period was nearly
as disruptive as later protests. They certainly did not have
trashing of buildings and things like that.

One of the first things that happened to Meyerson, of

course, when he became the chancellor, was the Filthy Speech
Movement. He just tackled that one, head-on. He just stood up
to people. He won, just decisively. Of course, that was seen by
many people as the proper approach: the change of leadership and
the removal of Strong was warranted.

Anyway, things went along. I always enjoyed that period

because you would meet as a group and we would discuss many
things- -exchange opinions. At one point, I wrote something. I
can t even remember now what it was on, but it was on some
specific protest activity. Martin read it, and he said, "Oh,

this is wonderful, George." Martin and I were very close,

incidentally. I believe I already told you that at our first
meeting of the Dean s Coordinating Council, with the chancellor,

why, he and I sat down next to each other by accident. From then
on, we were close.

He said, "Do
you mind if I add my name to this?" It was a
memo, essentially.
 348

I said, "No.
Why don t we just send it as a part of the
cabinet meeting?"

He said, no." So he used it [chuckles].

"No, It later was
called in his name, his position. It was something I wrote, the
entire thing, every sentence and word. But this is the way we
worked. There was no pride in authorship. As I was saying,
Mauchlan worked very closely with us. He served as the prime
contributor to many of the position papers that we were asked to
make .

The shadow cabinet actually started to lose its influence as

Meyerson took over. He had a very good council of deans and so
on, and he conducted the campus pretty much the same as Strong
had. He had a different vice chancellor. One of the vice
chancellors he had was a professor of metallurgy, Alan Searcy.
But he was out there on the firing line, out there on Sproul
Plaza day after day, arguing with protestors. Alan Searcy. He
was a friend of mine. It was just good to see this kind of new
attack.

A prominent name in that whole FSM period was John Searle,

also professor of philosophy, with Ed Strong. His piece, which
was written up and published in The New York Times Magazine
section, was truly a wonderful historical statement as to what
had happened and why it had happened and the sacred cause which,
of course, was free speech. It traced the dynamics of the
protest and what finally erupts is when the police come in--or
the "blue meanies," as they were called, in the sheriff s
department, in the FSM. They used to meet underground in the
parking structure under the tennis court and had their blue
overalls and batons and helmets. John was the scholar of the
period. He stated it in such a clear fashion. From then on, any
other university should have used his article as their blueprint
to avoid conflicts.

Swent : I m not quite clear how the shadow cabinet differed from just a
council .

Maslach: It was a selected council. It was just four or five of us, you
know? We would meet and talk across a little table.

Swent : More of an executive committee?

Maslach: Yes, it s more like an executive committee. We ve got this big

Dean s Council and the Chancellor s Advisory Committee thing. It
was a real strange operation. Think about it. Here, you ve got
the dean of the College of Letters and Science, who is
responsible for 60 percent of the students on campus; and then
 3A9

there s the College of Engineering, about 13, 14 percent of the

campus; and then the Business Administration and Law, lesser
percentages; and then there s a half a dozen small schools, like
Librarianship, Criminology, and so on. They were like one
percent. So you ve got about a dozen people there who really
have such a minor role on the campus on major campus issues.

And then the chancellor always had the business officers-

head of accounting, head of purchasing, and so on--down at the
end of the table there. They just really didn t care much about
what we were talking about. They were a noisy influence and more
than once had to be told to shut up. But it s a very good
exercise to think this through. I did, myself. I m much more of
a small-group person than a large-group person.

Heyns who came on as chancellor, was a large-group person.

,

He had that Coordinating Council, of large size. But when Bowker

became chancellor--! was provost with Bowker--he told me
directly--he said, "Ican only work with about seven people
directly." So he had a cabinet essentially of about seven
people. I ll get into that at the next session.

But it s an organizational strategy: how you work and how

you work best. The small group just got things done. I mean, we
would write a position paper, and I m not joking, we would start,
say, the middle of the afternoon, and we would all go our ways,
and we would all have our sections to write, and the next day we
had it all done, and we went in. Mauchlan or the others would do
the editing, and the work would be out, in two days. Everything
was finished. You can t do that with thirty people. So it s an
organizational strategy more than anything else.

The times were sad for me because I really valued my

meetings with Ed Strong, in which we would sit down--we were both
pipe smokers--and talk over different things. I felt that Ed had
really done me a lot of favors in terms of the budgetary process
--Engineering building up.

We went through a period with Martin Meyerson, who was

acting chancellor. I was involved almost daily with something.
This is while you re dean of engineering and while you re very
active in Washington, D.C. I was just working sixty, eighty
hours a week. And I am not joking. I used to keep a log of my
hours, especially on days when I was traveling. I never did any
of my lecture preparation in the office. I always did that at
home. Gee, I was now doing all kinds of night meetings.
 350

The Third World Movement:; Activism Becomes Violent

Maslach: One night meeting I had down in the Faculty Club was during the
next protest; namely, the Third World Movement protest. I had
been down there at some kind of a meeting. It was the Alumni
Society, the Engineering Alumni Society, which we used to hold
there. I didn t have the car, my wife was using our one car, so
I started walking up the hill, which is what I usually did. I
walked down and walked up. It was good exercise. I like to
walk.

So I walked up the hill, and somebody out near the garages

behind the Faculty Club yelled at me, and I looked and saw this
fellow in a mackinaw with green and black plaid, north woods type
jacket. He had a regular hat on, a fedora, and dark pants. He
yelled and wanted me to come. I just waved. I was late getting
home, and I was walking fast, which I do, because I m six foot
four. And I walked away.

The next morning, the headlines in the Chronicle there was

a murder on the campus, right there at the garages of the Faculty
Club.

Swent : Oh, my.

Maslach: So I called up the chief of police. I said, think I ve got

"I

some news for you." I told him what I saw, whom I saw. I
described the man--stocky, moustache, I d say in the thirties--
not young, not a student. He just looked at me after I gave all
this information to him and to the lieutenant there who was on
the case. He said, "George, promise me if you ever need a ride
home, call me. We will drive you home." He said, "You could
have been murdered."

Swent: Oh, my.

Maslach: It was true. They never found the guy. It s an unsolved

mystery. He killed a graduate student, as I recall, It was a
sad, sad feature.

You know, there was amazing change in the campus. Don

Mclaughlin and I sat down one time at his house. We were just
chatting over a drink. He said, "You know, George, everything is
going to change." He said, re going to have a different
"We

university." I couldn t understand his reasoning, but he was

speaking from wisdom, rather than from logical progression. He
just predicted all kinds of things, including People s Park type
 351

activities and protests. He just said, "We will be getting the

wrong kind of student here."

I argued with him back and forth, but in many respects he

was right because what happened was that there was now a change.
I think this was a change in our total society, but it certainly
was obvious here on the campus. We had more violence as time
went on. The FSM was not violent. But the Third World Movement,
we had trashing of buildings, we had murder of a woman student in
the libraryyou couldn t believe it was happening. You would
just stand there and look.

I walked out of the Faculty Club one day. My car was parked
up there between the Faculty Club and Birge Hall, and I walked
out, and all of a sudden I could not believe what I m seeing.
Every car--maybe eight or ten cars, parked every windshield was
smashed, including mine. I looked. .What the hell is going on
here? There were some students. I said, "What s happening?"
One student pointed up the street, and there was this man walking
with a pack over his shoulder, and he said, "The guy had a
bicycle chain wrapped around his fists, a steel chain, and he
just came and smashed every one. His fist is all bloody." He
smashed every car.

I said, "Let s get to the

police." These kids were so
perfectly organized. They had already sent two people down to
the police department; they had two people kind of following this
guy, closely [chuckles]; and they left half a dozen people there
to tell people who might come up what was happening, to beware,
to stay away from that guy.

Well, I later found out he was a discharged military man.

He came out of a mental institution in the military, and he had
been judged ready to live in society. As the police chief said,
he had a roll of bills on him that would choke a horse. He had
all kinds of money. He was sleeping up in the hills, and he was
violent. I said, "What can you do with a guy like that?"

He said, s standard police technique.

"It You buy him a
one-way ticket on the train and put him off. Ship him off to
somewhere else."

Well, that was almost a perfect analogy of what happened

here at Berkeley. People all over the world were sending
activists to us. We were the lodestone of the activists higher
education movement. I eventually had these people from New York.
First Princeton with a three-piece suit. And we had all kinds of
people coming into the activist movement. Even today, if you
wanted to take the chance, go down to People s Park and find out
 352

where did he come from, where do you come frcm? It s amazing.

It s not a home-grown protest movement. It s an international
protest movement.

So we re still getting the activist types, but it s a whole

new generation. All of the people who were activists then have
either died off or they moved into jobs like stock brokers and
bankers and so on, [chuckles] and they have. This is not just a
joke. They have become part of the system of operation. Savio
became a professor in the state college system.

These are troubled days for me and us. It climaxed in the

Third World Movement because the activists had a protest which is
not mentioned very often these days. One morning- -very well
planned every major entrance to the university was blocked off
by hooligans. They were rough and tough, physical. Up here,
where the Anthropology building is--Law School that area, Sproul
Plaza area every main entrance was blocked. And it was blocked
for a short period of time.

Now, what happened was that in Engineering people come and

park maybe in the structure down below there, on Hearst Avenue.
Or they come through the public transport station. The drop-off
is Hearst and Euclid. We had a young woman, Filipino background,
married to an architect, lived in San Francisco the two of them
were doing very well. She was working for us in the dean s
office. She was truly a beautiful young woman tall, very quiet,
and very, very competent. She did an awful lot of typing because
she was so good at it. She was excellent in maintaining the
files. She really was the person who kept our records straight.

She got off the bus, just at the time of the blockage of the
gates. She was beaten as she tried to get to the campus, she was
actually struck by these pickets. Fell. She hit her skull on
the curb. Within a day, she died.

Swent : Oh , my .

Maslach: I doubt if that was ever in a news article. I looked. They

mentioned the violence, that people were beaten, but that woman
died. Our officewe just couldn t believe what was happening.

Swent : What was her name?

Maslach: I don t recall her name, I probably have moved it out of my mind
purposely.

Swent : What a terrible

 353

Maslach: Truly, she was just a wonderful, wonderful person. Forget

everything else. She was gracious, gifted-- just everything
positive. And here, the irony, the Third Worldshe s a member
of the Third World! And the whole protest came out in the
newspapers from them that they wanted to preventwhat they did
was to blockespecially Third World people from coming onto the
campus. Try to figure the logic of all this.

Swent: No.

Maslach: Cannot believe it. It was so bad. Of course, this was the time
when the favorite thing was to call in a bomb threat to a
building and have the building evacuated. That happened over at
Wheeler Hall quite often. We got it under control after time,
but it was that destruction. There were classrooms in which a
delegation of activists would walk in, chanting. Not over in
Engineering. If it happened in Engineering, the students and the
faculty over there would have been very physical, so therefore it
was a good idea that we always attacked that kind of activist
movement outside of the campus.

It was, to me, a miserable time of the protest period. The

years of our troubles, I always used to call it, thinking of the
Irish problems in 1916.

Swent: How old were your children at this time?

Maslach: I became dean in 63. Our youngest was thirteen, the second was
fifteen, and the third one was seventeen.

Swent: So they had ideas about this, too.

Maslach: Well, Christina was on her way to Radcliffe. I used to drop in

and see her whenever I was back at MIT on the visiting committees
or something like that. I was there after Kennedy was killed. I
was the lone man in that dormitory. Father figure. All the
girls sat in Christina s room. Most of the students had left to
go home. They lived nearby. Just walked away. I would say 80
percent of the students at Radcliffe and Harvard just weren t
there. I stayed there until one or two in the
morning and
counselled these people just had a wonderful time with all these
wonderful people. They were having a rough time with Kennedy s
assassination. It was a tough time. It was such a spiritual,
emotional thing for them. I might not have reminded them of
their father, but it was [...].

Swent : That was a little before this--

 354

Maslach: Oh, yes. But Christina, I was saying, was in that position of
her life. So 63, 4--she was gone. And then a year later, 65,
Jamie went to Harvard. The one that got hit the most by all of
these things was Steve. He was thirteen when I became dean. He
started at Berkeley High, and four years laterso he went
through the whole thing.

I always remember him educating us in a number of things.

For example, they tell me it s more difficult to get cigarettes
at Berkeley than it is to get drugs. Marijuana you could buy
anywhere, right on the street. Also, he educated us on the
Beatles [chuckles]. "Don t listen to the music; listen to the
lyrics. Read the lyrics. They re saying something." And it s
true. The Beatles did have an awful lot of stuff that they they
were trying to say. So he kept us up to times with not the
protest movement but the drug movement --which he did not get
into. I m sure he had minor touches, but he was not a druggie,
and he was not into any violence.

He was on the football team at Lick-Wilmerding. [Looking

through papers] I was looking at this article.

Swent : This is a Look magazine fromwhat s the date on that?

Maslach: February 65.

Swent: And the article is called "Jet-Age Professors. Campus Revolt."

A full-page picture of George Maslach in the dining room. "Jet-

Age Professors."

Maslach: He was down at the heliport at Berkeley with other professors.

Swent: Yes, they had a helicopter port there then, didn t they? "The

gathering conflict disrupts the dream life of America s new

elite. "

Maslach: [laughs] It s actually a very good article. It was written by

one of the editors who went on to do quite a few very good
things. It was right in that period, 65, February 65.

Swent: There s a real disconnect there, isn t there, between

Maslach: Well, I told you privately maybe, but I ll say it here for the
tape. Heyns, when he became chancellor, once told me you could
always tell when there was something going to happen on the
campus because I was taking off for Washington, D.C., Friday
 355

afternoon. This was quite true. I must say I often would watch
the news, the eleven o clock news in Washington, and there s
Sproul Plaza. These were times when some very strange decisions
were being made.

In the words of Mario Savio, which I quote often, "The

movement will be dead unless the university commits another
atrocity." A typical atrocity was that the Regents voted to
punish the ringleaders of the FSM. Well, the ringleaders were
not just students. They were people from all over. Who were the
ringleaders? How were you going to do this? That just sparked
a new revolution. That became the sacred cause.

You have to remember that at some point close to all of this

Clark Kerr was fired by the Regents. As he said, he was "fired
with enthusiasm." He invited me to his house for a large dinner
meeting the president of Cornell University was there, who
happened to be a good friend of mine. So I came, for other
reasons, as well. Clark had a discussion about the university:
where it was going. I m sure the presidents of universities are
on the phone talking to each other, learning from the last
experience.

It was kind of a Last Supper, so to speak, allegorical not

that there was anybody in that room that was going to betray him,
but there was a Regent, a governor, who was going to fire him.
He admitted at that dinner and it was just before the Regents
meeting when he was fired that he had premonitions that this was
the end. He had had enough of Reagan at previous meetings. So
he was another victim, basically, of the whole uprising. Very
sad for not him alone but for the university and the state.

You have to go back and see what he did. We went from a

two-campus university to a nine-campus university under his
leadership. He was a principal in the development of the Master
Plan of the State of California for Higher Education. I can
argue with himI have won a couple of arguments with him that
it was a mistaken assumption that one person can fix things. The
demographics is what drove much of this. It turned out and he
has admitted since that the demographics were wrong, and the
population increase was driving the development of new campuses
the new campuses were developed.

Santa Cruz, Santa Barbara, Riverside. They didn t develop

them to become monster campuses like Berkeley, Los Angeles. So
we never really had the need for those campuses at that moment.
We have the need today, and we are not allowing students to come
to the university, even though we have the agreement that we re
supposed to take from the top 15 maybe now the top 10 percent.
 356

We need a new campus, right today. It should be in the valley.

We already have the place located, the physical location of this.

What s happening now is ridiculous. This has been held back

by the last administration in Sacramento. Whether the Regents
are going to take action is going to be very interesting to see.
But if I were in Clark Kerr s position, I would now sit in that
beautiful home of his, looking out over the bay, as though I were
on Mt Olympus, and dream of what the plans were.
. In many
respects, Clark was ahead of his time. That s one of the things
you could say about him.

There great sadness to that whole period.

s a To put things
in perspective, from a dean s standpoint, we were building up our
undergraduate enrollment by my going out and recruiting. But the
normal process was to move into graduate activity as a larger
part of our role. We went from a few hundred graduate students
to well over a thousand. From a budgetary formula standpoint, we
were growing in a way that was really quite dramatic.

When I became dean, we were not meeting our formula in terms

of number of student credit hours, etc., for a faculty member.
You have to remember, when I left the deanship, we didn t have to
recruit. We were not allowing thousands of students to come in
because we were already filled up. So in that period that I was
dean, we went from drought to a flood. Today it s astounding me
to listen to the numbers of students with a A.O, and all entering
students on the professional level in Berkeley Engineering have a
A.O or betterwhatever that means. It s amazing.

The reason it s 4.0 or better is that they give points for

advanced placement.

Swent : I ve always wondered how it could be better than A.O.

Maslach: Well, this point system is ridiculous. It was grade inflation.

I learned more and I ll speak to this morewhen I get into the
provostship period. But at the same time all this was happening,
there was a constant problem of recruiting faculty and meeting
faculty, helping doing everything I could to raise the quality
of the faculty and renew our older faculty. The previous faculty
was heavy with practitioners, people with industrial and
governmental and other experience. But the scholars, the Ph.D.
program is now essentially the main area of input and output in
this college the research complement, which is required of us,
as stated in the constitution of the State of California.

Here we are- -everything is changing. The campus is

changing. The movements are changing. The protests are
 357

changing. We ve got the problems of getting more minority

students. We re changing the whole curriculum from the old kind
of a curriculum to a master s and Ph.D. curriculum.

Swent: We haven t talked about the change in--the whole area of grants
and funding grants and those kinds of things, which we re going
to have to get into at some point.

Maslach: Well, I think that this is kind of national and international

question. We were benef iciaries--we were right at the crest of
the wave. First of all, I received increased funding. But this
was part also of my going to Washington, D.C. For example, the
Civil Engineering building was built in large part because we got
a million dollars from the federal government for that building.
I was not the main person involved in dealing with it, but 1
worked with them.

I wrote a proposal for my aerodynamic-heat transfer-fluid

mechanics people to have funding for research for the entire
department, an umbrella research program. In those days, we had
about thirty thousand each for about ten people, a three hundred
thousand dollar a year program, so I was pushing that.

We, of course, had the problem of supporting graduate

students. We could have TA-ships. We had RA-ships which came
from the federal government.

Swent: TA is a teaching assistant. What s an RA?

Maslach: Research assistant. Then, of course, we developed scholarships.

I started, while I was dean of engineering, raising money. 1 was
fortuitous, really, in this. I learned from other people, and I
was able to raise individual endowments from people who died or
wanted to make a memorial gift. But I did not work on fund
raising until I became provost, and that s another story, which
I ll get to.

But we were building up our faculty. I remember when,

before I was dean, one-third of our faculty was really involved
in research. That was when I was head of the research committee
for the Berkeley campus, so I knew where money was going. Today,
100 percent are involved with research. When I left the deanship
in 72, I would imagine it was up to about 80 percent at that
point because of all of the new people.

Using Chang Tien, since he s known, as an example to give a

little personal input of how my day was taken up--Chang went to
Princeton University for his Ph.D., and my first knowledge of him
was when he was proposed for a position in heat transfer,
 358

mechanical engineeringmy department. The chairman of the

search committee was Ed Laitone. Chang lien s professor at
Princeton was Bob Drake, who was the professor of heat transfer
here at Berkeley and who left for a variety of reasons. He went
first to Kentucky, I believe, and then he went to Princeton.

Here was this young Chinese scholar, obviously very good.

Came with extremely good recommendations from people- -Drake, of
course. One morning, Bob calls me. Sure, I ll talk to Bob. He
gave me sort of instructions on how to care and feed Chang Tien.
He just pointed out that Chang had not the best of English
accents British, that isbut he was learning, was getting
better, and you really have to protect him in this regard.

The reason Bob mentioned that, by the way, is that we had

once tried to hire a German professor who was one of the German
scientists in the Hitler program but was apolitical, and came
with a bunch of German professors here to California actually ,

not to California, to the United States. We should have hired

him. We tried to, but a group of older faculty in Engineering
protested. They had a variety of biases, but one of the main
things they pointed out was his language. speaks with this
"He

heavy German accent; the students won t be able to understand

him." They re talking freshman students; they re not talking
graduate students.

This man was not supported by the department. Bob Drake

just felt very, very strongly that this man was a top scientist-
scholar. The man went to Minnesota, a big one and established a
heat transfer research program that was number one in the world.
Just overnight. He was there for many years. So it was our
mistake. I think Bob probably left Berkeley because of this

stupidity.

Chang came in, and I was told, "Help him." When I met with
Chang, one of the things that I told him was you know, I
recommended to many of my young faculty, who were not good
lecturers or public speakers, to enroll in Toastmasters, a
private organization, free, and learn how to develop your public
speaking ability. And he did. I remember Rick Sherman, one of
the ones I recommended. He did, and he s excellent as a speaker.
I like to think that maybe my helping Chang a little bit by just
fatherly advice in this regard

We were trying desperately to build up our minority

enrollment and our women enrollment. I, about 64, wrote a book,
a brochure I ll call it. It s called "Why Berkeley?" I m sure
there are copies up in Engineering. It s a light blue, eight-by-
ten thing with beautiful pictures taken by a university
 359

photographer. I can t remember his last name, but Dennis

[Galloway] was his first name. I used to call him Dennis the
Menace. Photos of Engineering laboratories, lectures, the campus
environment, everything. I was making the pitch why to come to
Berkeley. This was early in the sixties.

It helped us enormously in our program, especially at the

community college level, but it was used also--it was pitched not
just for transfers but also for freshmen, so we sent it out to
hundreds of --probably thousands of high schools. People always
remembered it because I used endowment money, and I spent a lot
of time on it . I remember I got an editor and paid him as a
consultant. The editor was in the Radiation Laboratory program.
They got a big production program up there. He did a fine job of
editing it.

Recruiting Minority Students

Maslach: I started in on recruitments primarily in minorities. I was

giving scholarships. There was a program that is still in

progress today, which is MESA: math, engineering, science--! must
admit I forgot what the A stands for. But it was a program--
[Bill Summerton) professor in petroleum engineering, was the man
,

who should get total credit for this program. He had started it
before I became dean, really. He went out recruiting, basically.
I ve forgotten how he got money. I helped him at times, but he
would go to high schools, and he would identify--

I know one technique he used was to follow up on National

Science Foundation scholars at the high school level. When he
saw one that was a science or math or engineering, why, he would
put the pressure on them to come to Berkeley. By personal
intervention. He just made this a life career. He did it so
easily, so nicely. He s such a soft-spoken person. And yet he
was probably the best minority recruiter the University of
California ever had. That program is a legacy, his.

I remember his coming and saying to me, "George, I could use

a little money. We ve got this black student, and he s having
problems." I would talk with the black student. He was a
National Science Foundation finalist, junior year, fantastic
grades. But in the senior year, the grades were going to pot.
Why? Peer pressure. Other black students were pressuring him to
knock it off. I didn t learn until later on that the whole
secret for many of these people was to leave the ghetto.
Basically, that s what he did.
 360

I recruited students all over, with Bill Summerton.

Swent: What about women?

Maslach: I want to finish with the blacks because it is kind of an

interesting story. I was quite successful. I remember at a
community college, a black came to the car and was sitting there
and talking to me. He was so excited. I gave him my card, and
we met down on the campus. He turned out very well.

I was following their grades, and I would meet with them, as

individuals. I finally figured out they needed kind of a home.
They needed a room, a meeting room. They needed to set up kind
of a fraternity here. So I had a room up there in the Naval
Architecture building, and I turned it over to them. That was
great. But then I figured they needed some tutoring--

Swent : This was just for the minority students.

Maslach : Just for that group. I tried the Tau Beta Pi society, and they
worked on it. But it didn t work as well as you would expect.
Basically, any minority or any group would rather talk to their
peers or be told by their peers what to do. And so through the
Engineering Alumni Societyall these threads in my office here
[chuckles], I found a chief engineer of a plant out there in
Antioch. I had him coming in, doing tutoring.

Swent: Was he black?

Maslach: Yes, he was black.

Swent: An alumnus?

Maslach: Alumnus.

Swent: I see. You didn t have very many.

Maslach: No, not very many. Very, very few. But then I would go to other
organizations and say, you have some people who are engineers
"Do

who are black who would help?" PG&E--I found a wonderful guy.
He was not one of our alumni, but he thought this was great. And
so I started building up this tutorial program, and it worked.
We got [??], I remember. He was very good. In fact, his wife
was one of our stenographers in the mechanical engineering
office. A wonderful couple.

I was able to find out first-hand that you had to have a

critical mass. You had to have enough people with enough
continuity so that you get this feedback. They were a group on
 361

their own, on their own two feet. We didn t have it when we had
only five or six. I figured out that we needed to get up there
into percentages. There were three thousand students now, and
what we needed was more like thirty to sixty. I kept working on
it. We got there. I didn t maybe get it in my time, but the
recruiting went on. Karl Pister did a magnificent job of
recruiting. He dedicated himself to this.

In the women s recruiting, I wrote a brochure. I did about

four brochures, incidentally. The last one was for women. 1
spoke to the few women we had, and 1 was taken on a tour. One of
the reasons we didn t have women [was] we didn t have women s
rest rooms in Engineering, and it was true. I worked on that-
got that changed so that we had rest rooms for women students.
Really, it was a major job.

I wrote this brochure. As I said, it was the last thing.

By that time, I had a writer, Vivian Auslander, wife of a
professor in mechanical engineering. She had been a professional
writer-editor-producer of materials such as this. She was just
wonderful. The women s recruitment program turned out to be very
successful. On a one-on-one kind of interviewing. In other
words, we interviewed these women that we had as students, asking
why they came, what the problems were, etc. And we made it a
very personal thing, talking to these women students. I think it
was a very successful book.

Unfortunately, I left the deanship just as it came out. I

don t have any knowledge, any anecdotes. But when I was dean, we
had about one-tenth of one percent women. When I left the
deanship, we had one percent women. That s a ten-to-one rise,
and it was critical because it went from three to thirty. So we
had our critical mass. Women were now expected to be seen.
Since then, it has risen until, I think, that, oh, Karl had it up
to around 10 percent, 12 percent. So he had a factor of ten.

This has grown up in large part also because there are many
new features of engineering where women can work without having
to get out in the field and wear boots and a hard hat.
Computers, for example computer software is just a natural for
women. We have many women faculty now. And they re top people.
That s all there is to it.

It was a tough, tough job. It was just like pulling teeth,

it seems, to talk people into coming to the university and then
to join the faculty, to go on for an advanced degree. It was
quite a time. As I said, there were so many shifting bases
because the university was changing, the multiple-campus
university was changing everything was going on, in a wild way.
 362

Nobody had control of any one thing. I m sure Clark and other
presidents would admit that things were happening they didn t
even know about.

It was just going on. There was a revolution, really, of

our total society. This article, to get back to it they called
me, and the original intent of Look magazine was to write
articles about people like me, because at that time I was getting
to be rather widely known. There were such things as jet-age
professors. These were people who did consulting and [were]
constantly in the air. I was a good example [chuckles]. I was
spending an awful lot of time in the program, much of it
university-related, fund raising, but also much of it which was
consulting of a nature which I thought was public service.

Look Magazine Features the Jet-Age Professor

Maslach: See, teaching, research, and public service are the three things
we re supposed to be involved in. Public service is usually on
the end and rather minor, but for some people it gets to be a big
thing. So they sent out this team. I agreed to do it. George
Pimentel and I were the two they chose. George Pimentel here
[showing article] --just a fabulous person, just outstanding. A
professor of chemistry. Went on to National Science Foundation
work in Washington, D.C. And an outstanding athlete.

Here he is, shown in the picture, playing football with his

graduate students. I mean, he was a better athlete than almost

any graduate student. He was a state racquetball champion, Class

B, which is kind of a gifted amateur type. He was really a great
man and a great chemist. His work at National Science and NASA,
studying the atmosphere of Mars and Venus, was just outstanding.
He was much more the scholar, and I m much more the practitioner.

Anyway, Look sent this guy out. He was the editor. He

would talk with me at length. The whole technique was they would
follow me around. I had these two guys, the photographer and
this editor, who were just living in my hip pocket. They were in
my office, and I would take them over to meetings every once in a
while, take them to the Faculty Club for luncheons and talk with
--just everything you could think oftake them home, with their
lunches and dinners and so on.

The photographer spent about ten days with me. The editor
spent, oh, about three days. While he was here, the editor, he
walked over to Sproul Plaza. Of course, this was 65, February.
 363

Sixty-four had gone through, so we had the demonstrations which

had started, reallp, with the Republican Convention in San
FranciscoNovember of 63. He spotted the faculty revolt thing
as a major article--

Swent :
Campus revolt.

Maslach: Yes, campus revolt, as a major headline thing. So when they went
back, they ran this article, but they added onto it. You ll see
[demonstrating] --here we have Mario Savio and Clark Kerr. It
just got added onto it. I don t know how long it goes on, but if

you read the whole thing, I m sure you ll enjoy it. It changed
everything. See, this is a whole new article. And they came out
later, with a team. About two weeks later, t-hey came out with a
team of six or eight people, and they did a big issue on the
campus revolt. I was not in that one. I was in this one only
[chuckles] .

That was interesting, to have the guy living with me. He

would take rolls and rolls of pictures, this photographer, and
each picture here was from a roll. They looked at a roll, and
then they would take the best, and then they would take all the
rest of the 35--

Maslach: It was interesting. I had this fellow, the photographer, living

with me, practically. Actually, he lived at a hotel nearby,
Durant Hotel, or maybe even the Faculty Club--I ve forgotten.
But he would be constantly shooting pictures. I got used to it.
He actually went with me on a trip to Washington. He took
pictures on the plane and pictures in Washington, the Department
of Commerce meeting, so I had him in there at the Department of
Commerce meeting, Technical Advisory Board. At the end, he gave
me about a hundred eight-by-tens. Somewhere in my house-
somewhere --

Swent :
Well, we ll have pictures to go with the oral history, then.

Maslach: Well, I don t know if they re very useful, but anyway, they re
wonderful pictures. It was sort of a present to me then. But
he s the one that told me they just take one picture per roll. I
said, "My,God, that s expensive." He said, "Film. That s the
cheapest part of the whole thing." I agree; it is the cheapest

part. But he said, "You ought to see Life magazine. They take
one picture out of ten rolls." He said, "They re just constantly
taking." As a photographer, I know what that means. What
they re doing is they re looking for the moment, the picture of
 364

the moment, to capture that. You don t plan that, You don t

pose that. You don t pose any of these things.

This [showing picture] is in my dining room. The background

is that, as you see, [there s housing next door?]. But he was a
very fine photographer, excellent photographer. So it was a
wonderful period to remember.

Working out a Pact with The College of Letters and Science

Maslach: Getting back onto the campus situation, we--in engineering there,
as I ve proven, I think, to you--were a much larger part of the
campus representationnot only the administration but of the
Academic Senate. One of the things that I claim that I did was
to change the attitude of the Senate, the attitude of a lot of
faculty members so-called friends of minewho used to relate to
Engineering and talk about it as a trade school. Well, it s no
longer called a trade school by anybody. Hasn t been for many
years .

used to have to go through that and in the faculty

I

meetings a lot of people would kind of edge their words and

harden their tones, but it wasn t until we could really prove
that we were doing things nationwide, internationally, that were
enormously valuable. What I learned during this whole point in
time was that I had to go out and tell people what Engineering
was, what we were teaching.

Swent : It was L & S that had run the show prior to that.

Maslach: Yes. Let me give you just one example which I changed within the
university. After a couple of years, I noticed that we were
having difficulty with L & S. We had a number of courses that
were social-humanistic that students would take. They were
taking these courses and going on. They were supposed to take
our rules in Engineering the advanced courses as well. You
weren t supposed to just take Mickey Mouse introductory courses.
I went over there one time because I noticed there was in the
catalog a list called an List"
"S of courses within L & S that
could be taken for credit by students such as engineers, outside
of the College of Letters & Science.

found out, to my horror, that students at L & S could not

I
take, for credit, courses in engineering. If you believe in the
university concept the search for truth and so on we had a
caste system, and this was in the sixties. I didn t learn about
 365

this until 64 or 65. I just went ovei there. Walter Knight

was the dean of L & S. I just said, "Walter, this is ridiculous.
This has got to stop. I m going to take this to the Academic
Senate." He understood me--we were friends--so we kind of worked
out a number of things, sort of a pact, agreement.

We were in a situation of being sort of a colony of L & S.

We took our math, our physics, our other courses there, but they
wouldn t take any of our courses. It was a one-way trade. I
said, "Look, I ll tell you exactly what I m going to do if you
don t change things. I m going to have professors teaching our
students mathematics and so on." And we could do that. He
understood.

The student credit hours of physics was getting--f rom our

students supports half of the physics program. Chemistry, the
same thing. They gave an undergraduate Chem 1-A course in which
the lectures are given in an auditorium which seats 800. Just
think of the student credit hours that that lecturer is making
for the college in chemistry by that lecture. Sure, they have
sections where they break down into smaller groups, but this
tyranny within the university I had to attack.

Iwas very successful and we did it very quietly. Now, for

example, computer science courseseverybody now comes over from
L & S to take those courses.

Swent : That was one of the big--

Maslach: I did that when I was provost, but I actually got started in it
when I was dean because we changed the name of Electrical
Engineering to Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences.
Lotfi Zadeh was the brains behind that. We suddenly were getting
the kind of respect from the rest of the university that we
didn t have before.

Swent : As I understand it, that was sort of a critical thing, wasn t it?
Computers were new, and where to put the computer science-

Maslach: Well, it was up in the air until I became provost. L & S started
a Department of Computer Sciences, in competition with us in
Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, and that caused a
lot of confusion to people outside as to which was the right
computer science department for them. It s now really quite
small compared to the Computer Sciences and Electrical
Engineering combination. But that s a good example.
 366

More Engineers Receive the University Medal

Maslach: The other things that I would publicize is more engineers have
received the University Medal as scholars than any other area of
the campus overwhelmingly overwhelmingly. , Just sort of a
little story: I want to be sure that engineers would be put up
for various honors and awards, so I was talking at lunch one time
to a faculty member in Engineering, and I said, have a
"I

wonderful student by the name of Henry Lurie." He was in my

junior class, and he was so good, so outstandingalways right.
I d have great trouble with him because he d always have his hand
up.

This is a problem. When you re teaching, you ve got the top

students, you ve got the bottom students, you ve got the middle
students the largest group and you really have to talk to all
three groups or you just leave one group behind. Lurie s hand
was up constantly. And he sat in the front row, incidentally. I

said, "Henry Lurie has got a hell of a good record. Why don t
you look him up?" About a week later, a faculty member sees me
in the Faculty Club and, "Oh, Henry Lurie is just barely staying
in school."

I said, "That s impossible."

It turns outI checked. Henry Lurie in Engineering was a

straight-A student. Henry Lurie in English was, like, a C
student. And so they looked up the wrong student. Then I went
back to the faculty member and said, "You ve got it all wrong."
And Lurie became the University Medalist that year only through
my intervention, through the back door, sort of.

Swent : Were there two

Maslach: There were two Henry Luries.

Swent: Two separate students.

Maslach: One in English and one in Engineering. Obviously, someone was

looking it up, and ENG is Engineering and ENG is English, and so
they just got the wrong Henry Lurie. But I was constantly
pushing on this thing. I was constantly trying to help the
students with the EJC and the Cal Engineer. I told you about

that, alumni society. I still get the Cal Engineer free because
I m a member of the Alumni Society. Cal Engineer went on to win
many awards for its publication.
 367

Difficult Decanal Decisions Which Could Not Be Delegated

Maslach: But these things kind of meshed. There were many critical areas
that you had to pay attention to, the Alumni Society being one.
Then, of course, the day-to-day work--I don t know if I ve told
you this problemthe worst day of every semester was when I had
to review the records of the students that could be or should be
dismissed. Have I gone over this with you?

Swent : You mentioned the stack of reports.

Maslach: Oh, yes. Ihad to go through that stack of reports--Vi Lane had
everything in perfect order. I essentially went through it. No
other dean had ever done this. 1 would spend the entire day
looking over every file of every student who was subject to
dismissal. This was, of course, one ^of the great powers that a
dean has. You don t know these things. They never told you.
You learn about them the hard way.

For example, the dean has the non-delegatable power to keep

a student in residence in other words, waive the dismissal and
no other person on this campus has that power. The chancellor
doesn t have it, the dean does. It s a decanal duty with the
program. The dean of L & S has that. I had it in Engineering
when I was the dean of Engineering. So I felt very strongly I
couldn t delegate this so I had to do it . I would spend that
day it was so traumatic that every evening I d go home and have
a double shot of whatever I was drinking. I just couldn t do

anything. I was just so jumpy. I couldn t read. I was thinking

over every one of those decisions. Horrible.

Some of them were just really bad for me, I must say. I
worked on it, but also it brought me into contact with students.
One was subject to dismissal, and I found out he was an excellent
student, but he had a big fight with his father and went off and
married this girl and went to work and was trying to be a student
and work at the same time. He wasn t doing very well. I helped
him out by getting him special tutorial work with faculty. He was
in the field of thermodynamics and heat transfer. He finally
graduated. I met the father [chuckles]. I was invited to the
house, over there where you live, incidentally. And had a
wonderful luncheon with the family.

Also one of the students that I worked with very closely in

the EJC later became a professor of civil engineering. He
embarrassed me when he introduced me to his father and mother
after graduation as a bachelor s candidate. He said, "This man
has had more influence on my life than either of you."
 368

Swent : Ooh! [chuckles]

Maslach: That s a pretty tough statement for a family to take. Of course,

I smiled and later talked with them privately. I said--I used
the paraphrase of the statement, "That s the bourbon talking":
"That s the bachelor s degree talking." [chuckles] They
understood it. We always remained good friends. But
unfortunately that young man died a premature, early death, in a
very, very strange, strange way. Something to think about.
There is a very narrow pathway, about three feet wide, between
the Naval Architecture building and the Civil Engineering
building. People used to use it as a shortcut, just one building
up against the wall. We blocked it off. He left his office and
went into that narrow thing, and he had a heart attack.

Swent: Oh, my goodness.

Maslach: Found later, dead. Nobody even saw it. Eerie. Very, very sad,
very sad. He was in construction engineering, a brilliant civil
engineer.

Swent: You also made decisions on faculty that were heavy.

Maslach: The decisions on faculty were heavy, but they were very well
accepted by everybody, with minor exceptions here or there. One
of the procedures within the faculty handbook, Academic Personnel
Handbook, to be precise, is that the dean has to make a comment
on faculty so my weapon really was that I would send back cases
which 1 thought were too weak and our advisory committee, headed
by Sam Silver, thought were too weak; and there were protests
from the chairmen. They would say, "Well, gee, it s a good
case." I d work with the chairman and finally say, "Look, 1 have
to send it forward with a memo of mine, and I m going to say it s
a weak case because that s what I believe. Do you want that to
go through and have it turned down at the chancellor s office?
Let s just educate this guy and bring it up to date with a better
case next year."

I did that with a large number of cases in the beginning.

As we got better in our production of our cases and there was
more research components being put into the cases, the percentage
that were turned down by the chancellor dropped off, and our
winning percentage rose. As I said, when I became dean, it was
around 35 percent. I had words with Ed Strong, of course, but I
also had some words with Seaborg, Glenn Seaborg, who had been
chancellor earlier and who did not think much of Engineering here
at Berkeley.
 369

I worked on that pretty hard.

But I had ideas on various
things. For example, I learned that this is kind of sneaky, but
I learned that we were trying to get a faculty member from back
East--! 11 think of the university in a moment. It was
wintertime--Cornell--and I had been up at Cornell in the
wintertime. It is a miserable place to live. The winds come off
of the lake and down through Buffalo into Cornell. Ithaca is the
name of the town. It is a mess. You get snowbound.

One day I noticed in the newspaper that Ithaca was having a

major storm, and we were trying to recruit this guy. I just

picked up the phone and called him, his office on campus. We got
talking. He said, "How did you call this campus? Why did you
call here?"

He said, "This place is shut down."

I said, "What do you mean?"

He said, "Well, I m stuck here. I can t get home."

I said, "That s one of the nice things about Berkeley. We

don t get snow. I was out sailing last week."

We started talking. I was never too blunt about it, but I d

point out, "Look, I lived back East for years. I know that you
have to buy boots and snow gear for the kids." I said, "Look, as
a present for you being snowbound, come on out. We ll pick up
the tab. Stay at the Faculty Club. Bring your wife." This was
the key. Call when they re having a storm. "Bring the wife to
sunny California."

It worked every time. And I did it several times. I got

the reputation on this, amongst universities, because I would be
going to national meetings of university people. It was a
technique, but it was one that I learned from somebody like Clark
Kerr or Harry Wellman. In part, we pay off in sunshine. Maybe I
learned it from Sproul. Bob Sproul used to say that. Yes, it
was Bob Sproul who said our faculty salary rate is less than it
is in other places, but we pay off in sunshine.

You can pay it off in other ways, too. You have no idea how
much it costs to heat a house in Ithaca. The winter costs are
thousands of dollars. Here our costs are so low, so there are
benefits to moving out. We spent a lot of time--I spent a lot of
time on getting faculty and the budget built upindustrial
engineering. We also built up civil engineering, soil mechanics.
 370

Of course, the largest big growth was in Computer Sciences.

That s where we went from a small department to a department
that s the largest one on campus. That was the big change during
my tenure. When we finished, of course, we had over two hundred
faculty. My last gift to the college was when I became provost I
talked Bowker into approving my budget request, which was five
more faculty [chuckles], which caused a little storm down there
in the chancellor s office. Errol Mauchlan did not approve of
that growth.

I convinced people that Engineering was no longer in the

situation where they had to go out and recruit students. We were
flooded. Within a year or twowhich I ll get to next time the
flood of students at all levels here on the Berkeley campus was
overwhelming us. Up to that point, we got the proper number of
applications, the appropriate number of people accepted, and they
finally came so that we kept a steady-state going. But the flood
of students didn t occur until the early seventies.

It s hard to pick any individual things that we did and

point to them. But there are all kinds of little things that
happened. For example, the campus went from one big commencement
exercise on the football field to commencement programs at the
individual college level. This was kind of a boon for us because
it allowed us to make it much more of a family thing. Before, we
were lost in this big operation. But when we had our own, we
would fill the Greek Theatre with parents and friends and what
have you. We had hundreds of students graduating at the
bachelor s level, hundreds at the master s level, and finally
about 175 was the highest number of Ph.D.s when I left the
deanship. So you re talking a thousand people.

Think about this. That s supposed to be a four-year

program. You re supposed to have a graduate program, five years
to get a Ph.D. How come you graduate so many people? One part
is that they have a lot of transfer students at the junior
college level. A master s is a one- to two-year program, so we
are a very, very efficient and a very, very effective college of
engineering. People then suddenly realized how big we were and
how good we were.

This was very nicealthough I do miss the big university

functions. If I were able to wave the magic wand, one of the
things I would do is to go back to the days when we had
University Days and had speakers in the Greek Theatre the thrill
of Kennedy speaking before a hundred thousand people in the
stadium. I think those kinds of things were out of this world.
We don t do those things anymore. We didn t have Nehru speaking
in the Greek Theatre recently, or anybody like him. This campus
 371

can attract anybody in the world to come. We simply have that

kind of global presentation to the media. We did have a lot of
good speakers.

Swent: Was this part of the security concern?

Maslach: It started because the first commencements were being disrupted

by activists. In fact, the inauguration of Heyman as chancellor
was disrupted for a while, and then they left. But it was a
messy sort of a thing.

Changing the University Patent Policy to Reward the Inventor

Maslach: The other thing that happened when I was dean--these are examples
of things that you do that you don t "expect to do--I was on the
committee for patents. I couldn t believe the patent policy of
the university, which was to give practically nothing to the
inventor and thus they had very little income. I said, "That s

why you don t have any patents. The reason you don t have any
patents is people are taking them outside and getting a patent
attorney and the full benefits."

Finally, the vice president, [Robert] Underhill, snapped at

me. He was a bulldog type. He said, "Okay, George, what do you
think the patent policy ought to be?" This is an example of my
thinking on my feet: I said, "Well, just as a starter, I ll use
Newtonian or classical procedures. Half the income of the patent
goes to the inventor; half the income goes to the university."
Well, we finally compromised that after the cost of processing
the patent, half would go to the inventor and half would go to
the university.

Within one year, we had ten times as many patents. Up to

that point, the biggest patents were agricultural patents, like
strawberries, brands of strawberries or carrots. The famous
tomato, from the tomato harvesting for industry, which was a
canning tomato. But now we have major patents in the electronics
area and the biotech area. For example, biotech features are
just wonderful. The recombinant DNA splicing techniques were
developed here not here, at San Francisco and Stanford, a joint
patent. Well, the income from that is just enormous. We have a
50 percent share.

It turns out that patents don t really bring in big income.

If you want to start a company, that s where the big income
really comes in to the individual. Patents are not the biggest
 372

thing, although you have to protect yourself on the patent side.

I was able, just by that offhand remark in answer to a question
from a vice president, to change the patent policy of the entire
university. I always felt pretty happy about that.

Swent : Yes!

Maslach: We used to have a committee for the awarding of honorary degrees.

This was a campus committee for the awarding of UC Berkeley
honorary degrees. I was chairman of it for a number of years. I
would come up with names, and other people, of course, would come
up with names. The last honorary degree went to Jacques
Cousteau, who was an engineer developed scuba, which is s^lf-
contained underwater breathing apparatus that s what "scuba"
means. I thought he was an eminent example of someone who should
be honored. I had a whole list of people.

Our next one I was going to propose was Anna Freud for the
work she had done not anything to do with her father s Freudian
psychology work but her work on psychology in children. She
really did an enormous thing. Hers is lasting work; his has been
chipped away quite a bit over the years, but hers really truly ,

if you look at her career, it s fabulous. So I had her down.

John Lindsay came--mayor of New York City. He was asked to

come to California, UC, to give a Charter Day address, which he
did. He was a liberal Democrat. The Regents at that time were
extraordinarily conservative and filled with many people from
Stanford. We had Stanford football people, for example, on the
Regents. The Regents changed the policy. No more honorary
degrees. So in the sixties, this was another byproduct, a
horrible byproduct of the FSM. Lindsay came. He spoke. And he
was given the Berkeley Citation, which was hurriedly developed by
a committee headed up by Garff Wilson. He was one of the first
public recipients of the Berkeley Citation.

A lot of us have the Berkeley Citation. One horrible thing

was Garff Wilson gave the first Berkeley Citation to his
secretary. When that came out in public, there was quite an
outcry.

Swent: Oh, I daresay.

Maslach: Anyway--

Swent: So Berkeley gives no honorary degrees now?

Maslach: Hasn t for years.

 373

Swent : I didn t realize that.

Maslach: I have gone to commencements throughout the world, and I think

this is a major, major mistake. For example, the University of
Paris, that I know well, the degree is Honoris Causa. It s not
called an honorary doctorate. It s given for an honorary thing
that was done, to honor something that was done, an honorable
cause. They do it so beautifully. They do it with such great
dip.nity .

Harvard still gives honorary degrees, and they are an

example of what I consider the worst position in this degree-
giving business. They give it to a lot of local politicians and
alumni and what have you. It really cheapens the whole thing. A
lot of universities still give them because it s a payoff for
the commencement address. It was automatic. You got an honorary
degree .

My memory, of course, was the wonderful commencement when I

was the guide for Earl Warren. At one of the last commencements
in the football stadium, I was the attendant with Earl Warren,
who was then Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. He was to be
given an honorary degree. We had quite a distinguished group
getting an honorary degree at that time.

Nobelists at Berkeley

[Interview 9: March A, 1999]

Swent: Last week, one of our famous Nobelists died, Glenn Seaborg, and I

thought this might give you a chance to talk about some of the
Nobelists you ve known and maybe Seaborg in particular.

Maslach: It s interesting that you bring up the subject because all of us,
of course, when we saw the headlines sort of raked over our
memories and thought about Glenn and his career, not only at the
university but also at the Atomic Energy Commission.

With respect to Nobelists that I have known, the only one on

the Berkeley campus that I did not know was the first one, who
did work with fruit flies. You know, fruit flies are very, very
valuable research tools because they have a very quick
reproductive cycle. A generation of fruit flies takes a very
short time compared to a generation of humans, so you can do a
lot of work with fruit flies.
 374

Wendell Stanley, a Nobelist with the tobacco mosaic virus,

was head of the virology department here, was a good friend.
Others were somewhere between good friends and casual friends.
The easiest way for me to kind of explain it is that we had this
remarkable Faculty Club--still do, of course but when I came,
and as a young person, certainly with a young reputation, could
sit down and see all of these famous people, it was really quite
an inspiration to me. I really got a bang out of that.

The amazing part of it is that these people would talk to

you at any time. In the Faculty Club I remember once going over
and having dinner, because I was busy grading finals, and I had
to get the grades in the next day and I was behind time, so 1
went over there, rather than go home. I sat "down, and this man
came up to me and said, "May I sit with you?" I said,
"Certainly." It was Wendell Stanley. We just got talking about
various things.

Over the years, once you know a person either through a

committee assignment or in some academic role, why, you continue
that friendship, "collegialship, I should say--collegiality
"

For example, I knew Ed McMillan when he was back at the Radiation

Laboratory at MIT. I remember him calling me once, when I was
doing some research at what was called the College Avenue Pool.
We just got talking, and all of a sudden he said, George,
"Oh,

I ve got to quit. I ve got a lecture in the next hour. I have

to look at my notes." This was the idea of the way we kind of
spoke with each other.

The Faculty Club

Swent : About the Faculty Club, I ve heard people speak as if there were
sort of regular tables where people sat by department.

Maslach: Oh, yes. There was and is and continues to be a chemistry table,
which is directly under the moose head in the main dining hall.
The main dining hall was the first part of the building that was
built, designed by Maybeck. You can see his style in the
woodwork and structure. That in fact is where I met Glenn
Seaborg, although I had contact with him in some academic
committee of some sort as well.

The nice thing about the chemistry table is that I knew so

many of them through my own workteaching and researchand I
just would be able to talk to them. For example, chemical
 375

engineering is quite close to rarefied gas dynamics, and so

therefore I knew the faculty there almost entirely.

Swent : How large were these tables?

Maslach: Well, the chemistry table is essentially about the size of the
one we re sitting at, which is about five feet wide and about
twelve feet long, so you get fifteen, twenty people around a
table like that. There would be all kinds of discussions-
different kinds of material. I used to talk a lot with Joel
Hildebrand, who, while he was not a Nobel Prize winner, is
certainly well known in the field of chemistry here at Berkeley--
Hildebrand Hall, recognizing that. He and l--Joel, that is--we
used to talk about our careers and how parallel they were. We
were both in the Sierra Club, we were both hikers up in the
mountains, and we were both skiers, cross-country skiers. We
both had families and so on.

Swent: Isn t he the one who lived to be 103?

Maslach: He was over 100. think about 102.

I He and Don McLaughlin had a
standing joke going about who would be speaking at whose funeral.
As Joel always pointed out, "The main problem for you, Don, is to
be there." [chuckles] But we would joke and talk about various
things. We also talked about things that are serious. Joel
always had a very deep interest in teaching. He had strong
opinions on the preparation for educators in the high schools and
junior high schools. He felt the present technique of education
was not what is needed. He thought that anybody that taught
mathematics should have a math degree or at least a major in
mathematics. Funny that I just saw on television a discussion of
teaching credentials, and there s something like 10 percent of
all arithmetic and mathematics courses taught in high schools are
taught by people that never had a course in mathematics at the
university. The only math they ever had was building them up
into the teaching function. So it really is a sorry state of
affairs .

Glenn and I just got together in another way, too. He was

chancellor here at Berkeley. At that point, we had a very poor
relationship with the chancellor s office the budget committee--
with regard to appointment, retention, and the advancement of
faculty in engineering. I do remember early on Glenn telling me,
know engineering." I looked at him. He says,
"We teach the
"We

engineers chemistry, physicists teach the engineers physics, and

mathematicians teach the engineers math. Therefore, we are the
mentors, the people who are teaching you."
 376

I said, "There s much more to engineering than physics,

chemistry, and math. The engineering sciences," and I would

rattle off a lot of different things. 1 did not have any effect
on him at that point, I know.

The other famous people famous in my mind, of coursewere

Latimer; Latimer Hall in chemistry is named after him. He used
to be one of the great chemists, especially during the
development of atonic energy and the first atomic bomb. I always
recall reading the minutes of the trial of J. Robert Oppenheimer,
in which he was stripped of his classification to handle secret
material. You would have thought that [Edward] Teller and his
comments in that hearing would be the most damaging, but they
were not. The real damaging ones were by Latimer. He was quite
a character.

My contact with him was through the Faculty Club and was
really at the hearts table. He was one of the dominant figures
in the hearts table program. He and Norman Hinds, the famous
professor of geology--a very odd, erratic fellowwonderful sense
of humor. But I met them essentially through the social
functions at the hearts table in the Faculty Club.

Another Nobelist that I knew well back at the Radiation

Laboratory at MIT was Luis Alvarez. Luis was a tall, handsome,
active physicist. Tended to be quiet. Listened very, very well
and when he died was recognized as a physicist s physicist. He
was the one you would go to and ask questions. Even his
colleagues would defer to him, his judgment, which he exhibited
many, many times. He worked in a great variety of programs. At
MIT his controlled landing approach for aircraft was later
developed and used worldwide. He won the Collier trophy for
that .

When he developed a very sophisticated instrument for

physics analysis, the hydrogen bubble chamber, why, he was
awarded the Nobel Prize. But he would come down to the hearts
table every once in a while. But my memories of him were way
back at MIT, and I already talked about that--his proclivity to
try to stump you with all these tricks and questions and so on--
every morning.

later met his son, of course, the son here in the

I

department of geology. The son used or the father used the son,
whichever way to develop a theory as to what happened to the
dinosaurs. This is when there was obviously some great
cataclysmic explosion which involved atomic reactions because
throughout large areas of the world, there is a thin layer which
 377

can be analysed, and that thin layer of dirt contains rare

materials, which could only be caused by big astral catastrophe,

Swent: Cesium or iridium?

Maslach: I ve forgotten what element there is that is the trace element

that is used to identify that layer. It s one of the many
theories but one that I think has a little more backing than
others .

But then there were other Nobelists who came along, of

course. I had a wonderful opportunity, without knowing it, to

help a couple of them. Let s see. Shen in chemistry. I can t

remember the first initials, but--J. T., I think. He used an
instrument which I purchased through my funding, which I ll get
into later, for new laboratory equipment. When he won the Nobel
Prize, I remember he came up to me aftd shook my hand. He says,
"That instrument was the most valuable."

A very similar situation--

Swent : What sort of instrument was it?

Maslach: Oh, it was a very fancy, very complicated spectrograph,

spectroscope. It took practically all of the money I had. It
was a hundred-thousand-dollar instrument. So chemistry that year
got the lion s share of all the money for fifteen professional
schools and colleges. It was a typical decision, I guess, I had
been making all my life. That is, if I could see or smell
something good coming, I would go for it and put all my resources
and all my energy behind something like that.

I remember when I was actually provost and seeing the

condition of the small computer in the statistical department,
Department of Statistics, I should say. There was a request for
memory to be purchased and added to the piece of equipment. I
was kind of sorry for them. It was a pretty small piece of
equipment for such a distinguished department, so I put a certain
amount of equipment money into that computer setup, even though
statistics was not a part of the professional schools and
colleges. I remember later [Gerard Debreu] --D-e-B--you can look
this up. D-e B-r-u-e something French. He got the first Nobel
Prize in economics. He used that computer [chuckles], so we
talked about things like that.

The manI ve got a block on the namewho won the Nobel

Prize in physics for the first bubble chamber development was a
member of the Department of Virology, an extraordinary fellow.
He moved out of the physical sciences into the life sciences and
 378

became pretty damn close, I think, to getting a Nobel Prize in .

the life sciences. I ll try to remember the name, but he was

department of virology. The name is Don Glaser.

My contacts with the Nobel Prize winners were almost always

social. The Faculty Club and dinners at their places, dinners,
parties at our place things like that. I used to think that I
should have them more often in my home. I always thought my
children meeting people like this was a big positive thing.

remember going to the Seaborgs, and they would come to my

I
place, but we never really made it a close friendship with any
individual winner. I just felt proud that I knew and spoke

casually to all but one.

Swent : That s pretty wonderful.

Maslach; That was pretty good.

Working to Elect a Prestigious Berkeley School Board

Maslach: The other area that I d like to take up and move ahead with kind
of overlaps the deanship and the provostship, but I mentioned
earlier that I got involved in a lot of politics--f irst
originally, of course, here at Berkeley and then later on in the
national scene. Since this is a kind of an odd, tangential part
of my life, I think we ought to get into it.

Basically, the political activity started way back with my

father, as I said earlier, but when we moved to Berkeley in 1950,
Doris and I got heavily involved immediately in local politics.
The first campaign we worked on was one for getting Lionel Wilson
elected to the Berkeley city council, a campaign that he lost.
We were in charge of the house visits and so on--the only
campaign he ever lost because he went on after that to an eminent
career as a judge locally and then, of course, mayor of Oakland.
He s a person we ve always kept in touch with and visited with
and had parties with and so on.

Shortly thereafter, why, Doris s interest and mine too, of

course, went much more to the school board. We ran people like
Paul Sanazaro, who was a gold-medal winner here as a student at
Berkeley and then, when he took his M.D. degree in San Francisco,
won the highest scholastic award there, the gold-headed cane. So
he was certainly a fellow to reckon with. He went on later in
 379

his life to head up one of the National Institutes of Health in

Washington, D.C.

And then "Sparky" Avakian, who was a very active attorney

and then became judge here for a long period of time and was
considered for higher court positions, but never made it. I
mentioned him earlier, I think, when Kennedy came here. We were
running them together [chuckles] --Kennedy nationwide, but Avakian
and a man by the name of Roy Nichols, who was black and became
the first black Episcopal bishop. He operated in New York City.
A great career in the church.

And then finally we had elected to that board Sherman

Maisel, a member of the faculty here in Berkeley, economics.
Took a number of years and was a governor of the board of--
national [pauses] --excuse me, another block. But we had this man
[Alan Greenspan] giving reports to Congress on the state of
economy and the control, and whenever he speaks, why, the market
either goes up or down. This is the national-

Swent : Economic Advisory Board?

Maslach; No, it s not the advisors committee. I keep thinking Financial

Reserve or something like that.

Swent : Federal Reserve?

Maslach: Federal Reserve. You got it! Maisel never was the chairman of
the board of the Federal Reserve, but he was a member for a
number of years. Now, just think of that as a board, a school
board. That was probably the most prestigious school board in
the United States of America [chuckles]. We later ran for office
Sam Schaff, who was my colleague in mechanical engineering and
the rarefied gas dynamics division, so he served on the Berkeley
school board, so here we have another eminent engineer-scientist.

That took a number of years. Of course, we got to know how

to run campaigns, especially here in Berkeley.

Swent : These were years when desegregation was the hot issue, was it?

Maslach: Yes. The famous meeting where the school board voted to put in
busing break up the entire system, local schools, and bus people
from the hills to the flat and from the flat to the hills. A
famous decision. Very emotional, hot issue. We did it very,
very early in the life of that issue.

Swent: This is in the mid-sixties?

 380

Maslach: You d have to ask Doris.

Swent: Carol Sibley.

Maslach: Carol Sibley was a member later on. She asked Doris if Doris was
going to run, and Doris said no, she was not going to run, and so
Carol Sibley ran. We helped run her campaign as well. In her
book, 2 this whole school board period is a large part of her
memoirs. 1 always remember- -she had a fund raising party at her
house, which is that big house up here on the North Side, which
has been broken into rental units around it. It has a big garden
as well. She had this big apartment, the main apartment, of
course .

A lot of tables of bridge being played. I was assigned to a

table which was in her bedroom. I used to go around afterward

saying, oh, I was playing with Carol in her bedroom, [laughter]

She liked that. She would say the same thing. She was a
very public figure. Her husband, who died fairly early, Bob
Sibley, was very prominent in the Alumni Association here and UC
Berkeley in general. Just a block off on the North Side. Quite
an estate they had at one time.

Swent: You had a lot of influence on the schools.

Doris Maslach a Member of the Berkeley Rent Board

Maslach: Oh, Doris--you know, she made a career of it for about twenty
years. And then after that, the rent board. She was a member
and chair of rent board for a while, and still is active on rent
board activities, working now with the League of Women Voters on
a major report on housing in general.

The problem in Berkeley is not rent control. The problem in

Berkeley is to build, and right now we re building nothing, and
the reason we re building nothing is that no one will come in
here as a contractor and build because it takes years to get all
the permits, and then you have to agree to all kinds of stifling
restrictions which are ridiculous. You know, it s really

Carol Rhodes Sibley, Building Community Trust: Berkeley School

2

Integration and Other Civic Endeavors, 1943-1978, an oral history conducted

in 1978, Regional Oral History Office, The Bancroft Library, University of
California, Berkeley, 1980.
 381

strange. You look up the statistics in the census, for example,

of Berkeley roughly a hundred thousand people. The highest
percentage of advanced-degree people in the United States live
here, and the lowest income. You ve got a lot of Ph.D.s who are
just out there doing nothing. A lot of activists who are still
living here, with very low rents. That s the group that has
benefitted essentially from rent control. But this is a very
strange city when you get right down to it.

It s in the process of being enveloped. All you have to do

is watch, and the Asian migration has slopped over from San
Francisco Chinatown and the Richmond District and has moved
more and more to the East Bay, and we have more and more property
owners here in Berkeley. We re seeing the change of this entire
population from, my perspective, the twenties to now the
nineties. There s a French woman- -prominent in France,
Jacqueline. She came here. The first thing she said the last
time she was shaking her head, "George, San Francisco is an
Asian city. "

said, "Yes.
I It always was to some degree, but now it s
She was surprised at the change of population
obvious."

everywhere. And here s a person that has only visited us maybe

three times in thirty years.

Well, because of my activities in Washington, D.C., on a

variety of commissions and committees and what have you

Swent : An astonishing list of committees, I must say. [See Appendix]

Maslach :
Oh, yes, and I haven t even finished [chuckles].

National Political Activity: Meeting on the Plane to D.C.

Swent: It s really amazing.

Maslach: I got involved in national politics in a very strange way. The

first thing is when you get on a plane from San Fr.ancisco to go
east, why, you just look around and you see all kinds of standard
people from the university, from Stanford University,
politicians. Maillard, whom we helped elect when I was first
here in Berkeley--! knew the family from way back. Why, there he
is. He s going back to Washington.

Byron Rumford from Berkeley, who was a famous state

legislator and still known, incidentally, for his work. In fact,
 382

while I was waiting for you a couple of weeks ago outside here,
another person was waiting, a young man, a student from Stanford.
He wanted to get into The Bancroft Library, and what he was doing
was going over Rumford s history and the history of the housing
act that Rumford pushed through the legislature. He said, "That
was one of the greatest pieces of legislation that anybody ever
put through." You know, it s still having its impact.
Rumford was a very quiet pharmacist down there on Sacramento
Street. We got to know each other, and whenever we were able,
why, we would sit with each other and chat about different
things .

And the same thing would happen if you were on the other end
of the line, coming back to San Francisco on Sunday night. You
would see people at the airport, and you would arrange to sit
next to each other. It s amazing how many politicos I met that
way. I was on, as I said, the Congress Technical Advisory Board
for years with Herb Holloman as the assistant secretary. Did a
lot of very good technology reports for the economy. Herb was an
amazingly creative fellow.

For example, when we were working on the problems of air

pollution and automobiles electric automobile and so on--he just
came up with the idea that the government as a purchaser of many,
many automobiles at that time, the Post Office was in the--a
branch of the government, not the separate arrangement they now
have. He said, "Why don t we just get all of the Post Office
vehicles from now on have to meet certain standards on pollution
and use this as a test vehicle?" Well, he did this over and over
again, using the economic power of the government to kind of run
experiments and to fashion new technology to improve, in this
case, the environment, but he had other types of instruments as
well as automobiles that he worked on.

Chairing the Shipping and Hovercraft Committee

Maslach: The committee that I chaired there was the shipping and the
lighter-than-air--lighter-than-air--I ve got a block on what they
call it. I ve forgotten the name. The hovercraft. The big
hovercraft was essentially pushed by the navy. We found out
pretty quickly that it was going to be a long, long time before
it would ever get to the point where we could talk about building
destroyer-type ships, as a hovercraft.

But one day I was chairing the manpower commission, which

was normally chaired by Dael Wolfe, a famous editor of Science
 383

magazine, which is the magazine put out by the American

Association for the Advancement of Science. It s a premier
magazine for science and Washington happenings, especially. If
you were in the business of working in Washington, or going to
Washington, you took that magazine and read it pretty heavily.

Serving on the Manpower Commission

Maslach: The reason I was on that commission was very simple. I at one
time made a remark about my experiences at the Radiation
Laboratory at MIT, and this was the same as people working on the
atomic bomb and so on during wartime. While we should not have
been members of the military as such, there should then maybe
have been a recognition of this work,^ and we should have been in
some kind of a--I won t call it a Peace Corps, but the Peace
Corps equivalent. People at the Radiation Laboratory went into
the battlefields. Wore khaki. Not uniforms, but they did have
insignia and cards and so on to identify them as specialists.

The concept of specialists in the armed services has not

been publicized this is done all the time. So that concept of
having a group, a category who would be basically engineer-
scientists who were working on projects, rather than being in the
army or the navy sort of appealed to people like Herb Holloman
and others, so I got on that commission.

One day I was chairing a meeting. You have to understand, I

guess, the dynamics of Washington meetings and committees. Many
of the committees and meetings are staffed by people who come
from BostonHarvard, MIT--and Yale--or New York City or, of
course, Philadelphia and Washington. They fly in. They want to
get back out.

Maslach: Therefore, many committees will start at nine o clock in the

morning so that everybody has time with early flights to get into
National Airport or wherever and get into the Washington scene.
And then about three o clock people started to get nervous, and
they start moving around, itching to get out. They would have to
grab a cab, get over to National Airport, and take their flight
home. This is a big shuttle system that operates in the corridor
from Washington, D.C., to Boston, so you always had this kind of
a situation. You started early, but you finished early.
 384

One day on this Manpower Commission I m chairing, I m

listening to some presentation. Incidentally, we would have
written presentations from people like Ted Kennedy. We had an
oral presentation by Bob Kennedy. As you may recall, this was a
post-Vietnam scene. Just the ending of the Vietnam scene or
thereafter. But anyway, there was a lot of hot issues, the main
one being that the percentage of soldiers in Vietnam was
overwhelmingly black. You probably never realized, but anybody
that can get into a college and stay in college during those
years was exempt from the draft, so people that went to college,
of course, were primarily upper-class, well-to-do people. They
had a deferment.

This was a hot issue during the FSM [Free Speech] movement
here. I remember people speaking about this. It was odd because
the people who were doing the activist thing here at Berkeley
were all people that never were in the army, never served, and in
fact were here under a deferment because they were in college.
Here I introduced a new elementhere, you re out of college; you
graduated; you re maybe from industry, but you are in a
scientific corps of the federal government. So there were a lot
of issues.

The report of this Manpower Commission was destined to--in

fact, originally was organized to help Congress in developing a
new Selective Service Act, so it was not a casual issue that we
were dealing with there. Anyway, I looked up about three
o clock, and I saw Herb Holloman way in the back of the room. He
waved at me, and I waved back, and we kept going. He was inside
of a projection room in the back of this small auditorium on the
telephone [chuckles]. I thought, What the hell is he here for?
I d never seen him at that committee meeting.

Vice President Hubert Humphrey Seeks A Scientist s Advice

Maslach: We finished up, say, three- something, and he walked in and said,
"Hey, what are your plans for dinner?" I said, "I don t have any
plans for dinner anywhere." He said, want
"I
you to come with
me." He got back on the telephone. That was a bit of a mystery.
I got all my stuff together. This was a Saturday. He came back
in after the committee had all left, and he said, want you to
"I

come and talk to Hubert Humphrey." I said, "What?" He s the

vice president of the United States. So, okay, we get a cab and
get over to the old State Department Building, which is that
great baroque building north of the White House, connected to the
 385

White House, and sort of an overflow now for the White House
staff.

On the end of the building, facing the Washington Monument

is this wonderful office and offices with secretaries and what
have you. There was Hubert Humphrey, vice president of the
United States. We sat down. Herb had deliberately not told me
what the purpose of the meeting was, even though 1 asked several
tivmes. Humphrey then described what was happening in Washington,
D.C. This was the period of the Tet offensive. The Tet
offensive had pretty well run its course, and the United States
military had been whipped something pretty fierce. Tet being a
reference to a religious holiday.

What I heard was that President [Lyndon B.) Johnson had just
holed up in the White House, canceled all of his meetings and
appointments and so on, and was struggling with the Vietnam
problem alone. He had lost total confidence in the military
[General William C.] Westmoreland and others and he was really
just struggling what he should be doing. Both Holloman and
Humphrey agreed that he still respected scientists engineers and
scientists such as we represented right there. Hubert was
casting around for ideas. At one point, to my great
astonishment, and this is something that has lived with me to
this day, he leaned forward we were on the corner of this big
desk he touched my hand and said, "George, what do you think we
should do?"

Just put yourself into my position. Here you are, dragged

into this meeting without any prior notice and any knowledge, and
the vice president of the United States is asking you what we
should do about the Vietnam War. Now, that gives you an idea of
the state of mind in Washington, D.C. in general.
, They are
constantly trying to make contact with people outside of the
Beltway, get ideas and so on.

Swent : What was your answer?

Maslach: I ve forgotten. Oh, yes, I do remember. Excuse me. I do

remember. In my usual flip style, I said, "Gee, I think the
senator from Vermont has got a good idea," the elderly senator
from Vermont, who had proposed that we just pull out of Vietnam,
declare that we had won the war and it was a victory, and leave.
I thought it was a rather good idea. Actually, in the end,
that s essentially what we tried to do. We had great difficulty
in pulling out, of course, but essentially we ve always claimed
we won, which we did not.
 386

I was sitting there, talking with Humphrey. Holloman was on

the telephone. I don t know what the hell he was doing. We
talked about a whole variety of things. I knew some of the
history of the Vietnam War, and I knew something about student
activism here. But, for example, [President John F.] Kennedy
sent the first armed troops from the United States to the Vietnam
area-- 10, 000 armed troops. Up to that point, there was only
unarmed advisors--a lot of them, but not 10,000.

There was a lot of discussion of what we did and how we did

everything so badly. Humphrey especially just felt there were so
many things for example, the Kennedy administration inherited
from the [Dwight D.] Eisenhower administration the whole concept
of going into the Bay of Pigs in Cuba. Rather than saying,"No

way"
and dump it as a project, the Kennedys essentially embraced
it. Our whole relationship with Cuba the missile crisis and so
onwas all part of a bad decision on our part I mean as far as
I m concerned not on my part because I had nothing to do with
it .

So there are all kinds of soul-searching in this thing.

People didn t know whether they were right or whether they were
wrong. There was this great dichotomy. The moral position in
Vietnam is wrong, and our political position was ridiculous. The
domino theory that was just a farce. And the whole petitioning
by the navy, based upon the Tonkin Gulf incident involving naval
shipping. My belief to this day is that was a fake. It never,
never happened. You watched the news broadcasts, and three
admirals are standing up there at the map. They cannot point to
where the thing occurred. They cannot locate where the Tonkin
Gulf incident occurred. The whole thing was just a frame-up as
far as I was concerned.

Of course, later on, with the book by the former Secretary

of Defense, admitting the war was a mistake. I think now he

gives us a clear historical picture.

Swent: That was

Maslach: This man with the slick hairdo that came from the Ford Motor
Company. We ll think of the name.

Swent: Robert McNamara?

Maslach: McNamara, right.

So we re talking various things back and forth, and, as I

say, Holloman comes backhe later went on, after Washington he
went on to MIT, where he was some kind of professor. Holloman
 387

came back. He said, re going to go over to see Clark."

"We It
turned out that this was the second day of Clark Clifford being
Secretary of Defense. We said goodbye to Humphrey. He said,
"Drop in again. Please come by," and so on, and this and that.
I did a couple of times, but anyway- -

A Meeting with Secretary of State Clark Clifford

Maslach: We went over to the Pentagon. Holloman, of course, as Assistant

Secretary of Commerce, had a lot of clout. We were met where the
taxis dump you, the basement, and there was a colonel. We were
whisked upstairs on a special elevator to Clark Kerr s office.
Clark Kerr at that time--

Swent: Clifford.

Maslach: Clifford. I m sorry. Clark Kerr! Clark Clifford [chuckles). A

wonderful Freudian slip [laughter). Well, anyway, here s this
man--of course, he was much younger. He just died, as you
probably remember. He was considered the absolute insider, Mr.
Washington. He knew how to do things. He ran a big law office,
and now he was in a major position in the government. Very
smooth, very suave. Tall, great patrician appearance. I would
certainly like to have had him as my lawyer.

He didn t say much, but he knew what we were there for. He

went through the whole thing. His problem was that President
Johnson had lost confidence in the military and the Department of
Defense. Here he is, right in the middle of the Tet offensive,
moving in as a new Secretary of Defense. He was in a real tough
position, and what to do. You probably remember Westmoreland,
with his body counts and this and that, which proved to be false.

We were talking about various possibilities, and one of the

things that came out there was--I don t know if this was the
beginning. I have a feeling that Holloman and others had been

talking about this plan before I got involved, but eventually a

number of small committees were formed--! was on one. The first
one that got public recognition was a committee which was headed
up by an old buddy from the Radiation Laboratory, Zacharias. He
was a major figure at MIT in the Rad Lab days. I was not really
his buddy. I was certainly close to him in certain things, but
we were more, because of his character, on a formal speaking
condition. We were not casual and friendly in that regard. But
we were colleagues.
 388

He had done, on his own, probably commissioned by [the

Department of] Defense or somebody, after World War II an
analysis of the effectiveness of bombing as a technique of war.
There were many small committees and groups that were roaming all
around Europe, probing into all of the debris and examining what
was going on and actually what happened, because we did not know
the effectiveness, the great effectiveness of Germany putting
military factories underground. They were just not susceptible
to bombing.

And the use of distribution techniques and so on, making

parts for different instruments or pieces of armaments. For
example, the Radiation Laboratory had a group over, all
throughout Europe, looking at what they had done in radar
development and so on, why they had stopped. You probably have
read some of the reports, for example, of a group that went over,
looking at what had been done in physics with regard to atomic
bomb development, which had been actually stopped, for a variety
of reasons. We still don t know the real reasons because the
people have died. We ll never know why one of the top physicists
in the world decided not to do this although they had already
known the possibilities.

Anyway, the Zacharias committee essentially rode on the

coat-tails of Zacharias s analysis of World War II and came up
with a headline-making statement, which was that we should not be
relying so heavily on bombing; it s already proven in Vietnam not
to be effective, which was a distributed economy much less
concentrated than Germany, and it was not having its effect, and
this was a foolish endeavor. Zacharias could be very, very
specific and very sarcastic in his statements. That was one of
the first committees that was formed and actually got some notice
out rather quickly.

Working to Bring About a Peace Settlement in Vietnam

Maslach: I was assigned to a committee. Basically, we did not meet as a

committee. The whole concept built on- -whenever you re in
Washington, what you do is you go over and read up on this and
make comments and suggestions and recommendations. So the
committee that I ended up on was essentially one to work on
bringing about a peace settlement. One of the major problems was
the secretary of state, who was from the South and was appointed
by Kennedy. He was famous before he became secretary of state
for his recommendations that we ought to drop the atomic bomb on
 389

Moscow. This is while we were allies of Russia. This is the

very last days of the war.

Rusk was the name of--

Swent : Dean Rusk.

Maslach: Dean Rusk. I m going to condense a lot of this, but we came up

with all kinds of things. I relied heavily on my opinion, which
was we ought to be working, pulling in, the U.N. [United Nations]
on this. This was pursued. I got into one trip--at least two

trips--in which I visited the U.N. and met U Thant who was then
,

Secretary General, and then the American representative was Adlai

Stevenson. So 1 got to--I knew Adlai Stevenson before. We
worked heavily on his election, which, as I think I said already,
I probably drove more Republican old people to the polls than I
drove Democrats, based upon the results of the polls on that
precinct where I was working.

Adlai Stevenson, Not Decisive on Major Issues

Maslach: But anyway, I met Adlai Stevenson. I was able to get sort of an
idea of him again. I was mesmerized, as most of us were, by his

ability to speak. He just never gave the same speech twice. I

swear, he never used the same sentence twice. He was so

eloquent. His choice of words was so beautiful. But then, when
I had contact with him at the U.N., I suddenly realized that he
would not have been a good president. That was just because he
was always the one hand this, and yet on the other hand,
"on

this," and he would present the two sides beautifully, perfectly.

And then you d wait, "Okay, now what, Adlai?" expecting a
decision, should do this." You never heard a decision,
"We

never. I always thought that he would vacillate on major issues.

He would be probably prone to the influence of outsiders.

But it was rather interesting to watch everything that was

going on. If you recall, when we got later on into the peace
treaty period, Dean Rusk gave a major speech before the American
Society of Reporters and Editors or Newspapermen, or something
like that--in which he belligerently was talking about they would
have to come here and so on. He would not go there.

We met the next morning, I remember. We were given tickets

to the speech. It was in Washington, D.C. The next day we met
in Washington. I think we went on to the U.N. in New York. No,
we did not. We stayed in Washington the entire time, because we
 390

came up with the suggestion and that is that Johnson ought to

overrule Dean Rusk and agree with the U.N. recommendation, which
was that the peace treaty be carried out in Paris. This had been
an offer of the French government. The French government, as you
recall, had a long history in Vietnam, Indochina, before we did.

That afternoon we got into the White House got a panel into
the White House. I wasn t there. At the press conference the
next day, the next afternoon, something like that, why, Lyndon
Johnson had already talked with Dean Rask, and Dean Rusk at the
press conference made a change in his position. He came in, made
the statement that he would accept the U.N. etc., etc., going to
,

Paris, and that was it. Then he walked out. No questions. That
was that.

So we had that kind of influence as a committee upon the

president, upon the secretary of state, to further the peace
treaty activity. I always remembered after that, months after
that if you recall, there was an absolute stalemate between the
--a three-way stalemate, really between the French and the
Vietnamese and the Americans as to the shape of the table.

Swent : I had forgotten that.

Maslach: That took months! Really, the war was going on, and this took
months. Eventually, I am quite sure, although I cannot state
whose idea it was it certainly wasn t mine but we ended up with
a table which ended up with four sides. Then we had two
appendage tables, like little appendices, on two of the corners.
These were square tables with staff.

Basically, the issue was that the Vietnamese did not want
any staff people sitting at the main table only the top people
representing the nation, who had a vote, essentially. But
everybody else sat out. Originally they wanted them out of the
room. Eventually, they admitted them into the room, and they
were on a little table off on the diagonals. So we had this

had a funny feeling about all of this.

I This is what
diplomacy is all about? [chuckles] It took weeks of discussion
and meetings. I thought that was one of the strangest periods of

my life. You really did have a feeling--! didof being Alice in

Wonderland. What were we doing? I m an engineer! In on all of
these things.

Swent: You just go ahead and do it.

Maslach: Well, that s it. Of course, throughout my career, everybody has

recognized that I m the type that doesn t wait for long. Once I
 391

see a certain clarity and agree with positions, I want to move.

I
That s very helpful, especially in the Washington scene.

I recall coming home that first time after meeting Humphrey

and Clif ford--others and so on--I got on that plane, six o clock,
Dulles [airport]. Got a seat in first-class for an extra twenty
bucks or whatever it was--twenty-f ive dollars, I think. I just
looked at the they used to call them stewardesses.

Swent :
Flight attendant, now.

Maslach: Now they re attendants, cabin attendants, but I just looked at

this woman and said, "Whatever you ve got, I want a double." She
knew exactly people come onto that plane glazed, their eyes and
they just want to relax. That s part of that flight home, is you
can unwind, and you do it. But a good, deal of alcohol. Don t
kid yourself.

So anyway, I got home, and I drove home from the airport.

Now ten o clock at night. I had to go to work the next morning.
I turned to Doris, and I said, "You ll never believe what

happened." So we were up till midnight, just my describing this

whole thing. I always get tears in my eyes, thinking about it
because it was such an emotional thing. What are we going to do?

Swent: And I m thinking, only in America could this happen.

Maslach: Well, I think this happens elsewhere, but it showed the depth,
absolute depth of inability to deal with a situation. It was a
war the country was not willing to go into. It had no commitment
to this war at all. It was not like World War I or World War II.

Swent: No.

Maslach: Even the Korean "police action" took much more public support.
Vietnam divided us. It divided us, of course, very badly. But
here the vice president says, "George, what do you think we
should do?" I couldn t believe it. I swear, weeks thereafter my
mind was only half I just couldn t get this out of my mind.

In many respects, that was kind of my big fling [chuckles].

Swent: Well, that s certainly a high point.

 392

Bringing Nobelist Charles Townes to Berkeley

Maslach: Well, it s an odd point. You never expect this. You have people
here on the staff --for example, a Nobel Prize winner, Charlie
Townes. I failed to mention him. I think I already covered this
earlier, but one of the great people in the College of
Engineering was Lotfi Zadeh, chairman of electrical engineering.
He and I were both on the visiting committees at MIT. We knew
that they were going to lose some people when they chose a new
president, and they did. They chose Jerry Wiesner, an old friend
of mine at Rad Lab, and guess what: Charlie Townes was a
candidate for that position, and therefore Lotfi visited me as
soon as he came back from MIT, and we got together with Clark
Kerr--actually first with the chairman of the physics
,

departmentwould they accept him as a professor, Charlie Townes?

Oh, yes, but they had no FTEs.

And then we went to Clark Kerr, and we got an FTE

transferred from "systemwide" to Berkeley and from the Berkeley
chancellor s office to physics. Of course, I kept everybody in
touch with what I was doing, and we got Charlie Townes, Nobel
Prize winner, who is still working a great, great career, one of
the great Nobel Prize winners, in fact. Many of the winners you
never hear of again at work, but Charlie has just worked
constantly since winning that prize. The prize, of course, goes
back to the Radiation Laboratorymicrowave amplification, light
amplification. So Charlie and I have always been close. His
wife and I have served on a number of committees here on campus.

I got back home from this whole thing and went on various

things. I think I ve already covered my work with Robert

Kennedy, haven t I?

A Recollection of Robert Kennedy the Day Before He was Killed

Swent: I think- -

Maslach: I think I did.

Swent: I don t know whether you covered it, but you did talk about it.
If there s more you want to add later, you can.

Maslach: When I was making comments to one of his staff, and later I was
essentially asked to be on his advisory committee, which was not
a real committee, again, but just a bunch of people who,
 393

"whenever you re in Washington, come to the office and lock at.

stuff and give us advice," which I did. I think I told you about
his staff calling me, he talking to me the night before he was
killed. In fact, I know 1 talked about this. To hear those
firecrackers going off in the Chinese New Year s parade, where he
was at that moment, that evening, just struck me. Another thing
that lived with me the rest of my life. Just a strange, strange
man. Driven, a driven man. Again, a person I don t think would
have been a good president. He was just so wrapped up in his own
biases.

So much for my activity in politics in that regard, although

a lot of it continued on with my naval--twenty years of being on
committees for the Naval Academy and the postgraduate school, and
this lapped over from engineering into my provost period. But
you could not help but be in meetings with congressmen and
admirals and Chief of Naval Operation* and all this and that, you
know, and not have some kind of an influence.

"Dragging the Naval Academy into the Twentieth Century"

Maslach: I remember my first meeting--! told you about this--I visited the
Naval Academy so-called computer center and came back at lunch
and said, know what my job is here, and I know why you asked
"I

me to be a member."

Maslach: I said I was dragging the Naval Academy into the 20th
felt like I
century with computers because I knew the computers that were on
shipboard--heck, I remember computers on shipboard back in World
War II, when I was in the Radiation Laboratory. And so I felt
that the midshipmen were not getting the proper education in
computers and what they could do and what a computer cannot do.
You realize that this board consisted of some academics and, as I
said, some admirals and some former navy people but also some
ranking admirals who were operating within the navy, and then we
also had some representation from Congress, usually congressmen
from the area or nearby.

Jeff Cohelan was a member of that committee. He was from

Berkeley, California. Anyway, people would size you up. I
always remember when I came back and I made that speech on
computers, the head of Citibank, who was on the committee, former
navy man, was really staring at me and sizing me up. I had all
kinds of recommendations from him. He obviously figured that I
 394

was a and therefore I should be pushed.

"comer" After meeting
with people like Paul Nitze, who was secretary of the navy, and
John Warner, secretary of the navy, I was asked to take these
jobs in Washington, D.C.

The high point of that political period was when I was a

provost and Lyndon Johnson was calling me--not calling me--his
office called me and wanted to know if I would take a certain
job, assistant secretary. He read out all the jobs. People were
fleeing Washington, fleeing Johnson s administration. He had
empty positions everywhere. I was not interested to go to the
last two years.

The one thing I remember is Lyndon Johnson, with his

colorful speech every sentence had at least one curse word in
it and I couldn t believe it when he was talking to me. 1 just
couldn t believe it. That was one of ray telephone conversations
at high level. I kind of was pulled out of the Washington scene
with the Nixon administration coming in. I just was not a member
of the Commerce Board or any of these other things any more. I
retained my position with the navy, but that was a far cry from
the activity-

It s hard to explain to you. It s something you had to

feel. The level, the intensity, the energy in Washington during
the Kennedy- Johnson administrations was extraordinarily high. It
just collapsed, of course, with the Tet offensive and then on,
but during that working period, it was amazing what went on. You
would feel it at the airport the minute you walked in, the minute
you went into buildings and talked with people. Everybody was
intent to do something. There was a great, great desire to do
something.

Swent : You touched on this slightly, but we hear so much now about the
Beltway mentality and people being inside the Beltway or outside
the Beltway, and here you were flying from one side of the
continent to the other. Was there that sort of split?

Maslach: Oh, yes.There was no question at all. It was deliberate.

People were being asked from Harvard, Yale, MIT, what have you,
to come down and advise. Basically, you were asked to be
critical. You were asked to be forthright and blunt, honest.
This was a natural thing, but I think it was even more
appropriate for academics to act this way.

People in industryfor example, we had Turner from the

Turner Construction Company, a great international construction
operation. He and I got to be quite friendly. But he would not
speak in these terms that we academics would speak. Academics
 395

sort of have a special position in our culture, and they re

allowed to be noisy maybe, or forthright or independent. We
don t represent a commercial interest. In a way, we do because
we get money from the federal government for education, but we
don t have a personal career involvement, which we would get
profit from, our activity, by knowing people in the federal
government .

So yes, the outside-of-the-Beltway mentality is quite

different. I have to say, however, it s kind of a double jump
problem for someone coming from Berkeley because Berkeley has a
mentality there s no Beltway around Berkeley, but, boy, there is
an intellectual feeling within Berkeley. There is a larger
element of activism and do-gooder feeling that the rest of the
world laughs at. All you have to do is go to Richmond. You
don t have to go very far.

Swent :
Richmond, California.

Maslach: Richmond, California, right. Or just go up to the mountains,

which I like to do, and talk to people. Man, you learn very
quickly that Berkeley position is not a state position, is not a
national position. So I have to invert my head two or three
times, going from Berkeley, out of Berkeley, and then into
Washington. Boy, I m going from one culture to another.

Swent : You mentioned this, too. There s much more awareness of Asia.
We do face west.

Maslach: Yes, yes, yes, there s no question about it. And, of course,
people take your word about Asia. If you know Asians well you
have been to China, Japan, and so on--why, you re an expert
automatically. You go to New England and you re out of it.

Swent: They face another way.

Maslach: Oh, yes. They face a different way. There s no question about
it. People don t fly from New England to California as much for
vacations as they fly from New England to old England.

Swent: Yes.

Maslach: It s a different world.

Swent: Even today that s true.

Maslach: Oh, yes. still feel it all the time. Anyway, all of these
I

political things came with the territory.

 396

Swent : I have another question. Did you clear auy of these things with
someone else? I guess I m wondering if anybody ever questioned
whether you should be spending so much time doing these things.
Did you ever have to justify these activities as benefitting the
university?

Maslach: The first statement in response to that is that it s amazing how

much of this was on my own time. That s one. Two, I did spend a
lot of time on it, but those weekend trips were from a couple of
hours Friday and that s all that was lost as far as eight-to-
five, f ive-day-a-week time goes. When I was teaching, for
example, I did all my preparation of classwork in my home. There
have been surveys over the years that have never reached the
light of day the way they should, that point up and prove it,
that the faculty spends about sixty hours a week on faculty work,
to the best that you can judge it.

It s impossible to get a number on it because when you re

doing research, you can wake up in the middle of the night, the
way Mel Calvin did--I m sorry. He didn t wake up in the middle
of the night. He was sittingMel Calvin was sitting in his
automobile at the co-op, waiting for his wife to finish shopping
one evening when he got the idea that led to his Nobel prize.
You just cannot separate out when you re going to come through
with something. A lot of your time is worry time: are you going
to get that contract? Well, you have to go back to Washington
for a lot of these things, sometimes.

It was important to get the dean of the college involved.

We quickly gained more from visibility the reason MIT and others
are so well known is they re next door to Washington, D.C. I
mean, Wiesner was the science advisor to Kennedy. The
interlocking is remarkable of the East Coast Ivy League to
Washington, D.C., advisory. Georgetown University, right there
in Washington, D.C. People are half time over there, in the
capital .

So I was never criticized in terms of doing too much time

there. I remember Roger Heyns , of course, giving me that famous
little comment of his. He said, "You could always tell when
there was going to be a protest meeting because George was on his
way to Washington." It was quite true, unfortunately. But much
of this is, again, what comes with the territory. When you re
asked to do things--! turned down as many things as I was asked.
When I was on the Navy Board, advisory board, the Air Force
Academy in Colorado asked me, really pressured me, but I said no.

I turned down a lot of other things, including private

industry things that I maybe should have done. There was a
 397

company--! won t name it because it s still in existence and

heavily involvedbut they wanted me on their board of directors.
It would have been a big financial gain for me, but I decided it
was not the right one to do, so I didn t do it.

To answer your question very directly, no, I was never

criticized. It did affect my career as a faculty member because,
unfortunately, as a dean and then as provost, I let drop a lot of
my research. That I missed. I recognized I couldn t do day-to-

oay teaching because of the schedule problems. But I should have

hung onto graduate students and done more research. But that s
one of the things I made a conscious decision on, and I opted
that way.

Ernie [Ernest] Kuh, who was dean after I was, had a very
good technique of maintaining his research activities, by taking
the summer period, taking a nine-month appointment in the
deanship and then in the summer he could just concentrate on his
research. Unfortunately, summertime is when you put the budgets
together and when you put together all of the cases for the top
faculty of the college, so summer is not a time that dean s
office is just sitting, twiddling its thumbs. It s working, very
hard.

Roger Heyns , a Wonderful Chancellor

Maslach: To get back kind of to the campus, if I may, we had gone through
chancellors at a fairly rapid rate. When Roger Heyns had his
heart attack, this was really a major blow to us because he
brought stability to the campus. He was famous in Michigan for
tackling an activist who wanted to get on the stage and grab the
microphone. He was like Hayakawa, ripping out the wires of the
truck. Heyns actually tackled the student activist. That was
one of his strong points [chuckles] when he was appointed here as
chancellor. He was a psychologist, from a very, very prominent
department of psychology. You know, just a wonderful person to
work with.

As I earlier said, he worked with large groups and spread

his influence and his personality, and he was very effective, in
a low-key way. This low-key thing was very useful in stabilizing
the campus. We went through a difficult period, of course, with
him, which was the Third World Movement protest, in which we had
damage to buildings and things of that nature. But he always
seemed to get control. He was a wonderful person for this
campus .
 398

He told me, I rememberand also he talked to !>owker and so

on, but he never had an opportunity, never had the time to really
get down into the academic workings of the campus the budget,
for example. He felt he was not good in that area, but you
couldn t fault the man. He truly, truly on total record was a
wonderful person for the campus.

The Search Committee for a New Chancellor: De-Selection

Maslach: I was chosen as dean of engineering to be a member of the search

committee for the next chancellor. The chairman of the committee
was Dean of the Law School Radish. Sanford is his proper
"Sandy"

name. We had student representation on the committee. "Buzz"

Barber was one of the students at that time. He s now in the

development office. I can t remember the young woman they had.
I can t remember her name. A professor of statistics, David
Blackwell, was the one who recommended Bowker.

We met in University Hall. They set aside a conference room

on the top floor, and we had access to that room and other rooms
in the university president s office. We had total control of
long-distance telephone and travel, if necessary. It was a well-
funded committee, and it was chaired by Kadish, who was
extraordinarily ef fective the proper balance of moving ahead
with deliberate speed and yet constant attention to the main
goal: namely, the personality and the type of person that we
wanted.

If I might digress and be more general, it s amazing, if you

look at the appointment of presidents of the university or
chancellors on the Berkeley campus, but after you go through the
standard requirements of a personbeing a stable person, having
a degree and a specialty and is able to be appointed as a
professor to be on the Berkeley campus all these are the
standard things then what you do is essentially appoint for the
problem at hand. Clark Kerr was appointed president for his work
on multi-campus development. Other people came in because they
were experts on budget development, working with the legislature
or the governor and so on.

On the Berkeley campus, we needed somebody we wanted

somebody who was going to be a, quote, "academic," who would
represent the programs and work on development of programs. We
had Meyerson, of course, and Heyns were stopgap type
appointments. Good ones, excellent ones, but they were not,
 399

quote, "academics and did not work in the development of the

campus .

And the campus was going through a major change. Greater

emphasis on graduate work and also, later, admissions problems
and so on. We needed someone with this kind of a background.
The buzzword at that time was "charismatic."

Swent : Oh, yes.

Maslach; Everybody was always judged as was he charismatic or she

charismatic. You had to prove you were charismatic. You also
not quite a buzzword, but your appearance, your physical
appearance was part of this charisma business. I always remember
the professor of statistics black, incidentallyhe said, "Well,
I have a person in mind." This was our first meeting, and we
were all just kind of spilling our guts and talking about people
we knew that might be a candidate. He says, s not "He

charismatic." Everybody laughed, of course, because that was

kind of an joke. fact,
"in" someone once
"In said that he looked
like a rumpled bed. He s not a figure of sartorial excellence,
but I think he s going to be on the short list." So that was our
first introduction to the man who was later identified as Al
Bowker .

Swent : You said the professor of statisticshis name was Black? Or he

was black?

Maslach: No, no, he is black. I hate to admit this forgetting his name
for he is truly one of the great statisticians of the world in
the last century. Just soft-spoken, quiet. His wife is a piano
player. She plays jazz, and she s got the greatest left hand.
She could play stride jazz, with that strong left hand, better
than anybody I know. She was wonderful.

At any rate, we started in. Kadish had a very simple

procedure. He didn t use the word, but in a year or two it was
word that haunted me in my work. The word was "de-selection."
Basically, what you do is get as many people that you think are
qualified, and you start getting telephone calls and writing
letters and getting information back. You get much better
information from telephone calls because people will level with
you. We didn t tape any calls or anything like that, of course,
but people would say yes, no, and give you the reasons. But this
was all confidential.

We had internal people; we had external people. This was

another big divide. Should we have external or internal? Heyns
was external. A lot of people think after a while external
 400

people they serve their function to stir up the mechanism; now

you should have an internal person. A lot of arguments that it
should be an internal person because the Academic Senate is such
a powerful part of our activity and just to understand the Senate
and its operation you need an internal person [chuckles]. You
get all kinds of arguments.

There were a few internal candidates that were proposed at

the time, but basically there were people from outside. There s
a rich field of people from the outside. You look
internationally. That just happens to be the kind of argument
you might have.

We would meet every week in the evening, five o clockor

six o clock, I thinkwe had dinner out and just have all this
material. We had very fine staff, and all these candidates that
were being proposed. The de-selection process was one that
didn t start from the top in saying, "Let s consider the best
people" but basically started from the bottom. De-selected, do
not select. If you de-selected, you dumped.

Now, in engineering, this is a technique of analysis that s

called a moronic approach.

Swent : A what?

Maslach: Moronic. The moron s approach. I mentioned this to Radish. If

you re a moron, what you do is just knock away all the people you
don t want and guess what: you end up with the person you want.
But you don t decide on the basis of excellence. We had forty,
fifty people we were talking about here. And we re talking two
levels down, the people that recommended them, and we would ask
those people for other people. You got an onion-skin kind of an
operation, peeling the onions to find out the qualities of that
individual .

We just were going through this process week after week,

going down there during the week maybe to read cases that were
nominated. It was a real tough job, but it was wonderfully
handled. Kadish I was really very, very impressed with his
ability as a chairman and with his driving force, every meeting,
we dumped a few. We got rid of some.

The value of the technique is that you re not surrounded by

a lot of junk. You get rid of people that are not going to make
it, very quickly, so they don t impinge on your thinking. We
went on for several weeks. His technique always was the standard
technique, of course, in decision making. Everybody would write
down their top choices or the bottom choices if you re de-
 401

selectingthe bottom choices, and we would just get these secret

ballots, and then we would put their names on the board. Guess
what: we drop these people. And you could see the process of
people risingpeople that stayed in there, people that got good
votes, top votes.

Well, it came to pass of course we get down to our short

list, and we had a short list. You can never just go in with one
name. That s essentially taking over the president s and the
regents authority. Incidentally, we had regents in attendance
at this group. Anyway, we finally got down to about three
people, and then we had people come out and visit. It was very
interesting.

Chancellor Albert Bowker s Fantastic Reservoir of Knowledge

Maslach: I remember sitting for my first time with Al Bowker. We didn t

know each other. We kind of checked our backgrounds, and we
found out that we did have a lot of common friends. He, of
course, was at Stanford for years. He was chairman of the
department of statistics when he was an assistant professor,
which is quite a statement. Then he went on to the New York
scene.

We knew a lot about him in New York. I was very impressed

with his operation in New York. It s one of the reasons I came
to thinking so highly of him. I was talking at that time with
Herb Caen [San Francisco Chronicle columnist] and his legman. I
said, "Gee, we know what we re doing." After Bowker s name was
public, why, just look at his record on increasing the salary of
the faculty at NYU. [chuckles] So they put it in Herb Caen s
column, and I was in that column three or four or more four or
five times.

We brought Bowker here. Without question, in my mind, the

best. The thing that you have to know about Bowker that very few
people know about him and he s almost a self-effacing person.
Let me show you a couple of facets. He wrote a bopk on
statistics, Statistics for Science and Engineering. It has been
a best-seller ever since. It s still selling. It s revised, of
course, constantly. But it s a fantastic book. How many people
really know about that?

With him came Rosedith [pronounced Rose Edith], his wife,

who was a professor of education down at Stanford, also a
statistician. I remember talking with her on various problems
 402

involving statistics and education and so on, and she was

amazing, really good. She knew our faculty better than we did!
The Stanford education department is considered number one still,
probably. At that time, it certainly was. She took a job down
there, rather than a position up here, because of the conflict of
interest that might be looked upon. She was a great, great
asset. Not that Roger Heyns s wife was not a great asset. But
Roger Heyns s wife stayed in Berkeley. Was a wonderful hostess
and the wife of the chancellor. So was Rosedith, but in a
different way.

I don t think there existed at that time, and in many

respects I don t think exists today, a person who could touch Al
Bowker for his general overall knowledge of higher education in
the United States. He always has maintained close contact with
the New York scene and the Washington scene. When he left here,
he lived in Bethesda, inside the Beltway, and worked with
universities in Washington, D.C. The University of Maryland, as
I recall. And then he went back to NYU and worked.

But he knew everything about higher education. He knew all

the people in higher education. He knew the history of higher
education. He knewas he put it, when he was talking to me--he
said, "You know, I don t bring any new ideas or any magic wand
that says, This is what we should do." What 1 bring is
experience and the knowledge of experience of what will work and
what won t work--what has been tried elsewhere and didn t work,
and why." This was a fantastic reservoir of knowledge that he
brought here, together with a sense of very high standards,
which, of course, he got originally from Stanford and when he was
first working at NYU.

You ask him a question, way out in left field, about some
development in higher education, and he could tell you in detail
what happened, why it happened, what went wrong if it went wrong,
or what went right if it went right. He was just enormously
gifted in this ability. He would get across his ideas very well.

I remember my first meeting with him. I thought, "Gee, I

have to challenge this guy." So I said, have a system of
"We

higher education, and I m sure you know- -university, state

college, and community colleges. For example, we have a lot of
community college transfers. What is your thinking with regard
to the transfer process?" Boy, he knew as much about it as I
did, and I was already an award-winning expert on the transfer
process .
 403

Maslach: I was saying he was so knowledgeable in the community college

transfer process. I was very impressed with what he was talking
about. Already, he had learned during his visit and also in
contact with people who were asking questions on the telephone-
he knew a lot about the internal workings here of the Berkeley
campus. He knew about the Academic Senate and its relationship,
and he knew a lot of people on the Berkeley scene here.

Swent : Was the California Master Plan [for Higher Education] still an
item of this time?

Maslach: That was it. That was basically shorthand for what we were
talking about, the three levels of higher education and the
transfer processes within them. He knew things about our
admissions that I did not know. For example, years later, when 1
was quizzing him about some of these things, he pointed out that
the number of people who applied- -minus of course, the people
,

who were not qualified; minus the number of people who decided to
go elsewhere leaving the final number of people who came was
exactly the number we needed to maintain a steady state. Now,
this was a rare artificial, almost, consideration. In other
words, we did not have in those early days, when Bowker came
here, a need for turning people away. We had this perfect
balance going on. It went on for two or three years, the first
two or three years of his administration. Now we re turning away
people by the thousands, tens of thousands. So he knew about our
admissions situation.

He knew quite a bit about our budget situation. He was not

walking in cold. His work down at Stanford, his knowledge of
people at Stanford was amazing, and that helped immensely in this
whole thing. He asked me a number of questions as well, and he
also pointed out that he would set up a provost system, and he
liked the concept of the provosts. He, of course, was the friend
of a famous provost at Stanford, Terman. I was also a friend of
Terman s, with time. I had known him alreadyhad met himbut

through Bowker I got to know him very, very well.

He talked about the provost system and how it worked in

Stanford, and he also knew about the provost system at Berkeley
under Monroe Deutsch in the thirties. I got some idea of how he
planned to administer. As I said, I was impressed with his
tremendous reservoir of knowledge and where we should be going.
He was oriented academically, and he was already thinking of
various things that might be done.

We all voted for him on the short list. We did give two or
three other names on the total list to the regents. Of course,
they interviewed. One of the great, great things in Bowker s
 404

favor--! think he would have been appointed for other reasons,

but the fact that he was a Stanford man and we had a quite a few
Stanford regents on our--the number of Stanford people who were
on our regential board was, of course, a big help to him.

The Triple Mandate as Dean of Engineering Was Accomplished

Maslach: So he was appointed and came here. It was kind of a transition

period. I have to kind of go back to my own thinking here. You
have to remember that every ten years I wanted to do something
different. I had been dean of engineering from 63. This was
now 72, nine years. I was not footloose, but I could see that I
had done everything that I had been asked to do. We were the
number one college within the nation, in the best survey ever
made. We were second, a very close second, to MIT on other
surveys. Number three was Stanford. In time, they were all
linked together as number one.

We put the undergraduate degree program on a four-year base,

and we had the faculty of engineering dominating the
chairmanships of all the committees in the Academic Senate. We
were heavily, heavily involved in the academic administration of
this campus. Those were the jobs that Ed Strong laid out for me.
So I could now speak confidently with people about engineering
coming of age, and it was this period when it did come of age.
All those nasty little people who called it a trade school no
longer talked that way. As I told you, people were calling me
and asking me to get the vote out so the engineers would be at
the Academic Senate meetings. We developed stability on the
campus. Engineering was known for that. The quality of
engineering was upgraded.

But was, of course, getting antsy, I guess.

I The
Washington scene had intrigued me, and then I had dropped that.
But in certain respects, you have to kind of look at this and put
age into the equation. In 72 I was fifty-two years old. If you
look at careers of people, study biographies, people who stay in
a public eye and public profession, or even privately, when they
get to fifty, they ve got time for one last hurrah, and so you re
trying to decide what you want to do at this point.

I had weaned myself away from the idea of doing something in

Washington as a public service function. I was not casting about
yet, but I was ready to be enticed, I guess is the way to say it.
I could tell that I had served my function. I believed in my
 405

ten-year concept, and somebody else should be the dean of

engineering.

Mike O Brien was civil engineering. John Whinnery was

electrical engineering. I was mechanical engineering. In a
certain waynot because it was traditional because those three
people represented three different major functions of
engineeringthe concept of rotation of deans from other
departments was in everybody s mind. We had candidates,
obviously, from other departments who could take over the
deanship, so I did not feel out of place.

I was most proud of the fact that I had gotten our record
with the budget committee and the chancellor s office so high
that people that we proposed were not automatically accepted but
were accepted without big argument. We were getting 95 percent
of our people approved, without any question. This permeated the
department. We had done so many new things. Of course, with
Lotfi Zadeh, we had made a big movement in development of
computer sciences, so electrical engineering and computer
sciences became a dominant department, not just within
engineering but within the campus.

So 1 felt that it was time for me to go back to my research

and teaching. In fact, I gave that very serious consideration.
Chang Tien, who was chairman of mechanical engineering and later
vice chancellor and then chancellor here, was eager for me to
come back and work on revising a big course that I had worked in
earlier. I was beginning to be kind of at loose ends. Of
course, when you re getting up there, you realize your children
are all in college or out of college. I m looking, "Where do I

go next?"
Steven Maslach and Jamie Maslach,
artists in glass.

Doris Maslach at Steven s open house

in Larkspur, California, 1971.
Visit of a scientific delegation from the People s Republic of China to
the University of California, Berkeley. Luncheon, University House,
December 14, 1972: Chalmers A. Johnson, Professor of Political Science
and Chairman, Center for Chinese Studies; Chang Wen-yu, Deputy Director,
Institute of Atomic Energy, Chinese Academy of Sciences; and George J.
Maslach, Provost Professional Schools and Colleges.

Photo by U.C. Graphic Arts, Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory.

Christina Maslach, Ph.D., Stanford University, with grandmothers Ruth
Cuneo and Anna Maslach, June 1972.
Anna Maslach, circa 1972.
U.C. Deans of Engineering: George Maslach, Morrough P. O Brien, Donald
H. Mclaughlin, John Whinnery, and Ernest Kuh, 1976.

Photo by Russell Abraham.

University of California delegation to the People s Republic of China,
Beijing, 1979: George Maslach and Vice Premier Huang.

Doris and George Maslach on either side of Vice Premier Huang (center),
Taiwan Room, Great Hall of the People.
George and Doris Maslach with Paul Gray, Dean of Engineering, at the UC
Faculty Club, May 1998.

Photo by Peg Skorpinski.

 A06

IX PROVOST FOR PROFESSIONAL SCHOOLS AND COLLEGES, 1972 TO 1981

Superdean to Represent the Chancellor s Office

Maslach: I was primed for when Bowker called me after becoming chancellor
and asked me to come down and meet with him. He and I developed
very quickly a close relationship. We would meet sometimes in
the chancellor s office, but he knew better than that. He would
have me meet over in the University House. If I walked through
the chancellor s office to meet with the chancellor, that s a big
signal to an awful lot of people, and the next thing you know,
there are rumors all over campus. I knew that when I walked
around within Engineering as dean.

So we would meet at University House.

Swent : That was his residence on the campus.

Maslach: His residence on the campus. We would have a drink and talk. He
was always very forthcoming, very direct, very honest. He told
it the way it was. He went into this provost position concept of
his. He gave the Stanford example, and then he also pointed out
that there was a need for two provosts, really, here on the
Berkeley campus because there was a big difference between
professional schools and colleges on the one hand, and L & S
[Letters and Science] on the other hand. I knew a lot of that,
and I had worked on a lot of that problem.

But he had it much more organized in his mind. First he

discussed them in terms of the relationship of the provost to the
deans of the schools and colleges. He said, "What I need here is
a superdean who represents the chancellor s office concept, the
budget." The thinking at the campus levelto get that down into
the dean s level. He felt that the various mechanisms that had
been used before had not been very useful for changing, and he
felt that the professional schools and colleges needed a variety
of changes.
 407

He went through a number of these, and he felt that what I

had done in engineering--! was the perfect person. He pointed
out the School of Law is really kind of an entity to itself or
likes to think of itself that way, and the College of
Environmental Design is too small; they are quite inward- looking
and so on, whereas Engineeringthe work we had done, by Ed
Strong s demand, to get involved in the Academic Senate, we were
a really much more integrated operation than any of the other
potential schools and colleges.

So he asked me to be provost of the professional schools and

colleges. We got talking about this, and I wanted to know who
was the other provost. The dean of L & S was Walter Knight. He
had had a checkered career, I would say--a lot of victories, and
he improved things in a variety of ways, but certain things he
tried to get done didn t get done, so he was ready to quit as
well.

Roderic Park, Provost for Letters and Science

Maslach: I m a little vague as to if he actually retired--! think he did--

from the position. The new man that came in was Rod Park, as
dean of L & S. Split title: dean of L & S, provost of L & S. We
were the two. Rod Park and I knew each other in a variety of
ways. We had met in an academic sense, but we knew each other
also because we were both members of the Richmond Yacht Club
[chuckles]. He had been commodore out there at one time, for one
year.

He was a very active racer and very active, especially in

the Trans-Pac race. Not only raced his boats one after the other
to Hawaii, but he raced single-handed on one of his boats from
Los Angeles to Hawaii, and then came back single-handed. These
are feats that you really cannot understand until you ve sailed a
lot on the ocean.

Swent : It s a very big ocean.

Maslach: Well, there was a wonderful joking comment made, "Are you really
certain that you want to become an ocean racer? Do you really
like ocean racing? Let me tell you what ocean racing is like.
Ocean racing can be duplicated in the stall shower by turning on
only cold water and you re dressed in a leaky set of oilskins,
and your boots leak and everything else, and you have somebody in
the shower beating you with a baseball bat while you tear up
hundred dollar bills and stuff them down the drain." [laughter]
 408

It is a very expensive operation, and it s a very demanding

operation physically. It s tough. It really is a tough
operation. I always admired Rod for many of these things. He
was a true yachtsman, and he devoted himself. Very, very good,
incidentally. His record proves that. I always remember when he
came back from Hawaii, single-handed, I happened to be Saturday
morning down at the yacht club, and lo and behold, I see his
boat, which is a pretty obvious color. I said, "Rod s back."

I left my boat. Went back to the clubhouse and lo and

behold, there s Rod Park. He looked pretty damn good. A little
thinner. Well-tanned. We sat in the bar and drank some old
coffee, as I rememberheated it up. And talked about the Trans-
Pac race and coming back. The image I always retained is a
wonderful one. The Farallon Islands outside the [Golden] Gate
here is a marker, of course, for anybody returning because you
have all kinds of navigational equipment on the Farallon Islands.
I said, "How close did you make it to the Farallons?" He said,
approached it--fog--and I knew I was fairly close."
"I

This was before we had GPS [Global Positioning] systems,

incidentally, which you could tell within a foot where you are.
But he said, "There was a break in the fog, and there s Noonday
Rock," which is one of the rocks to the north of the main

Farallon Islands. He said, saw it.

"I Went on the other tack
and took down the big jib and put up the blade" (which is a small
jib) "and just loafed around and went north, away from the
islands, and just took it easy until the fog cleared, and then
came in." He hit the Farallon Islands right on the nose! That s
a navigation feat in itself. The casual way he did all of this,
that was just wonderful.

We formed a good team. We had good respect for each other.

We were knowledgeable of each other s position. We were
knowledgeable of standards which we both held and our academic
push. We really never, never had any dispute. We worked hand in
glove in so many different ways. I m talking big things, like
space development, budget developments, academic department
developmentwhatever it was, and this will come out as I discuss
the provostship much more.

Swent : Were the number of faculty and /or students roughly the same in
the two jurisdictions?

Maslach: Basically, the makeup of L & S is heavilystudent credit hours

is heavily undergraduate. Their graduate component is small.
When you then look at the professional schools and colleges,
their undergraduate component is small because we use L & S for a
lot of our courses, especially math, chemistry, and physics in
 409

engineering, a? an example, but also the social sciences, the

humanities and so on.

But then when you get to upper division, especially, of

course, graduate, we were all engineering. The graduate
population on this campus is dominated, over 70 percent are
graduate students in the professional schools and colleges. So
you ve got, say, 60 percent of the faculty in L & S, 40 percent
in professional schools and colleges, which is a pretty close
approximation. But the School of Law has one thousand law
students, all graduate [students], and they take very little in L
& S. It s almost all in law. Business administration has an
undergraduate degree in business, but it s dominated by the
School of Business Administration courses. The first two years
are not, but-- just like engineering the first two years are
heavy in L & S. The same thing pertains to the College of
Environmental Design and, to a lesser ^degree, in the College of
Natural Resources. So those are our big undergraduate-graduate
overlaps .

We dominate on one side, and they dominate on the other.

Basically, they have four colleges, and there were many attempts
over many years to break L & S into four colleges and very wisely
for the L & S position, they rejected that. Basically, they have
a College of Physical Sciences, Biological Sciences, Social
Sciences, and the Humanities, so those are the four groups.
We ll get into that later on because we made together some major
changes in the biological sciences.

I started kind of making up my mind, as I said. This was

early on, so I had enough time to alert people in Engineering. I
had already made my decision to change about a year before, when
I became provost, so I had already alerted them to start search
committees going.

I had a lot of people who didn t want me to leave

Engineering, but I also had people who wanted me to leave
Engineering and respected me for that. I remember a man was
speaking to me when I first announced it. He was now a middle-
aged Turk, not a young Turk [chuckles], but he thought it was a
smart idea: we should develop a rotational concept.

If you really want to get into the technicality of it, there

were deans who stayed on for ten, twenty years. Mike O Brien
did, and people like, oh, Social Welfare--

Swent : Chernin?
 A10

Maslach: Chernin, Dean [Milton] Chernin was there for over twenty years.
So if you look at the Academic Personnel Manual, it says,
Department chairmen shall serve for five years, and rotation is
required. And it says for deans that they will serve for a
period of seven years. This is a nominal period of seven years.
Rotation not required. So a dean can stay on for a longer time,
whereas chairmen --the re are so many of them, you want to rotate
them around anyway.

I felt [it was] time to leave. I had carried out these

meetings with the total faculty, and we were a totally new
faculty. 1 had constantly pushed for larger and larger numbers
of faculty by getting students here. That ha.d worked in the
junior college level, especially, but also the freshman level as
well. My books, like Why Berkeley?, brochures and whatnot--! had
gone not to the engineering people, but I had gone to the
advisors. I told you. One community college after another. Did
all sorts of high schools. And just sat in the hallway with
students, looking at the files.

1 went down to Pasadena High School because it was such a

good high school. I wanted to know why it was such a good high
school. I talked to the principal and the advisors there, and I
talked to students. Why do they go to Berkeley? And I really
learned an awful lot by my traveling around.

So Ifelt that I had done my job. Getting into the provost

position was a new problem. I had left the engineering college
in good hands. Had good associate deans and good staff--Dave
Brown and Rachael Stageberg. But then Rachael saw me taking off.
She knew her way around, so she said she was going to leave, so
she opted to go to systemwide and followed Frances Woertendyke
down there, and was administrative assistant to one of the vice
presidents. I ve forgotten which one. But she didn t last there
too long because she later answered an ad that I sent out. She
applied for assistant to me, and so I--this was after I became
provost, of course.

There was about a year there that we didn t see each other
at all. I said, "What s with systemwide? Why don t you stay
down there?" She said, "There was nothing to do down there."
She wanted to do things. Working with me, she saw things getting
done. She was in court, giving expert testimony and things like
that. She would be representing us, engineering endowment
systemwide, at meetings. She enjoyed that activity. Dave
enjoyed that activity as well, but he saw where he was very
valuable and necessary within engineering.
 All

The problem I had, of course, was to start getting a staff

down there in the chancellor s office, California Hall. I went
down there and was shown where 1 was going to have my office. It
was occupied by a professor from Natural Resources, Agriculture--
Loy Sammett. He had, oddly, not a clearly defined position. I
think you might say he was sort of vice chancellor for research,
but there was another vice chancellor on the other side from the
English Department, Jack Raleigh, who was vice chancellor of
academic affairs. Through him went all of the cases for
appointment, advancement, promotion.

Down the hallway, the second floorthis is California Hall

--on the far north end was an area where we had all of the people
who processed all these cases. I ll get into this because this
became part of my job. I met with Mark Christensen, of course,
who was Bowker s appointee as vice chancellor. Mark is a man who
will forever look like a slightly aging teenager [chuckles].
Maybe that s a little--he looked like a graduate student. He
looks constantly okay his hair is grey now, but I saw him not
,

too long ago. God, this guy still looks like he s in his
thirties, you know? At the most. He s a very boyish-looking
fellow. And he has that personality. He came through the
Academic Senate during our period of troubles to be a prominent
member, with a good regard of the faculty. A professor of
geology.

1 saw what he did, and we had all these talks before, before
I took the job. Of course, I talked with Rod and talked with
other people down there and Raleigh and Loy Sammett and so on.
Just as a little funny thing, because it s something I remember,
Loy is not a very tall man. He died a few years ago. But I
would place him about five-foot-seven, f ive-foot-eight--slight
figure. I accepted the desk that he had there, and the chair.

Furnishing the Office for Comfort and Friendliness

Maslach: After a week or two, I was getting back pains I couldn t believe.
I tried other chairs. Finally, I talked to the woman who was the
office manager for the chancellor there. I said, "This chair is
not large enough or something. I racked it up sort of high, but
that doesn t do it." I said, "Who do we get our furniture from?"
It was a standard company that makes all this stuff. I called up
and said, "Here s my problem. Here s who I am."

"Oh, yes." The guy said, "Are you sitting on the chair
now?"
 412

I said, "Yes."

He says, "Get out of the chair. Turn it over, and read the
number and letters on it." So I turned it over and read the
numbers and letters. He says, "How tall are you?"

I said, "I m six-foot-four. "

He says, "Oh, God. You ve got the smallest chair that we

[laughs]
make." "That s for someone who s on the order of five-
six to five-eight. What you need is--"

I said, "Can
you come up here?"

Swent : So you ended up with a full-size chair.

Maslach: It s actually a chair that you see everywhere now. It was just
getting popular at that time. It was a chair that came above my
head--

Swent : An Eames chair?

Maslach: No. It wrapped around a certain amount beyond your shoulders,

and it had armrests. You could lean back, of course, and all
that stuff. But it was big. It was tall. It was very
comfortable. You could actually go to sleep very easily. I
always remember the office manager saying to me, "Oh, this is so
expensive!" I said, back is more valuable than this chair."
"My

Within months, the chancellor, the vice chancellor, a number of

other peoplevice chancellor for financehe had that chair. I
cost that chancellor s of f ice--budget--a lot of money by getting
that equipment in there. I got a little cocktail table, round
table, and a couch. It was all very nice.

It was so nice that the office manager agreed that we ought

to repaint the office, so we did. It was a very horrible
grayish-bluish color which I found very not only dull but dismal,
and so we repainted it with basically the standard color scheme.
You know, the paint companies have all this down cold. If you
say, want beige," why, they just pull out the beige page and
"I

show you all the colors that go with that beige, and you should
do this with the floor and this with that. I tried to make the
office a little less of a bureaucratic cubicle.

I bought a very bright-colored, abstract Norwegian rug--gave

it a feeling of festiveness. Covered that dark floor. I added
another chair, easy chair. I arranged the furniture so that I
 A13

had the desk in a corner. Anybody visited me, I just would be in

a conversation with them around a cocktail table. We would have
coffee. I never, never, even as a dean, talked to anyone across
a desk. I felt that that was really one of the most divisive
techniques .

I was always very happy with Bowker s and alsoremember I

talked about Ed Strong. Roger Heyns same thing. Always moved
,

comf ortable--get away from the desk. But other people are so
glued to that desk they cannot move from it. It s surprising
that people still put that barrier between themselves and the
public .

Forming the College of Natural Resources

Maslach: So I kind of got things fixed up down there. I, of course, spent

a lot of time talking with Bowker and with Mark [Christensen]
[about what] the duties were and what they saw in the future.
One of the first things 1 received just to give the academic
flavor to what a provost didwas I was handed a document by
Bowker. Said, "Why don t you handle this? It was something I
inherited." It was a report on the College of Agriculture and
the School of Forestry, petitioning the chancellor to allow them
to merge as a new College of Natural Resources. Well, I looked
at it, and I was really surprised. I knew people down there.
Here they had all signed off on this. I kind of wondered what I
should be doing. I m into a whole new framework here, a new
academic level, another notch up. We re not talking departments
and potential departments; we re talking about schools and
colleges .

I did my usual: I refer to people I knew and start talking

with experts. Downstairs in the basement of California Hall is
the graduate division, and there was the dean of the graduate
division, Sanford Elberg, Elberg. He had been dean for a
"Sandy"

little while. He was a wonderful, wonderful person. Still is.

Last time I saw him, he was living up in the Clark Kerr complex.
His wife had died a number of years ago. He has retired, of
course, for years as I was when I saw him.

But here was two big faculties with a lot of graduate work,
and so I went to the graduate dean. We discussed it. He knew
about the report because it had appeared before the Graduate
Council and the Academic Senate, had been voted on, and the
Graduate Council approved the merger. Well, I didn t even know
about that. Bowker didn t know about that. So I hot-footed up
 414

to Academic Senate offices. Of course, I knew the women there.

I was always on very good terms with staff. Maslach s Law Number
A, B, or C. All the top staff people, administrative assistants,
and so on.

I copied the report of their approval and what they

discussed and what they thought was right and what they thought
was wrongall these things that I would need. 1 then, of
course, studied all of this and went down and checked out with
the dean of forestry and the dean of agriculture and started
talking with them. They are two sizeable units on campus. They
are complex units because they have split appointments with the
agriculture research operation, which is a totally separate
budgeted unit. It gets its money through the state but from the
federal government.

It comes from the Land Grant Act signed by Lincoln. This is

how far back their ties to the academic goes. [The] Land Grant
Act set up the concept of federal college of agriculture and
mechanical arts, A & M. Mechanical arts was essentially, in
those days, mechanical engineering, but it was College of
Agriculture and College of Engineering. And very rapidly,
because it was important, the College of Chemistry. These were
the bedrock units of the campus. This was true within all of the
United States. So we re dealing here with historical functions
as well as very complex budgetary systems. They are eleven-month
appointments down there because they do their field work during
the summer. Take a semester off and transfer to this budget and
that budget. I learned a lot.

Swent : Was there also a relationship with Davis that you had to--

Maslach: Oh, yes. This was true, of course, in areas other than
agriculture and forestry. It was also true in the field of
nutrition and some of the biosciences as well. But when the Kerr
concept of the multi-campus university was developed, there were
separations of units from Berkeley throughout the whole system.
For example, few people realize but all of the work in the
development of the grape industry, the wine business, was started
here at Berkeley. Oenology, that field of wine-making, was the
product of the work of the dean of agriculture down here. The
man s name- -name of the hall, that s one of the buildings
[Hilgard Hall] --agriculture complex. But all the technology was
moved to Davis. Of course, that s one of their biggest
achievements up there. But for many, many years this was all
done down here. Grapes in Berkeley. Wines in Berkeley.

But forestry was a school with a great reputation, one of

the top if not the number one school of forestry, and there are
 415

not too many in the United States. The Forest Products

Laboratory was already established out at the field station. It
was one of three or four within the United States, doing a great
deal of work, in collaboration with industry.

Building a Staff

Maslach; So here s my first entrance into the field of what we re going to

do in the professional schools and colleges. I advertised for
people. I got Rachael Stageberg as an assistant. She, of
course, just helped me enormously because she was, first,
knowledgeable of me and I of her, and we just did not have to
spend much time with each other. Then I had a wonderful
secretary. She only lasted for a short time because she got
married and went up to live in Paradise, California, with her
husband, who was a graduate. They were very active in sports,
selling sports equipment. They, themselves, were big sports
people .

Swent : What was her name? Do you remember?

Maslach: [no audible response]

Swent: We ll get it later. That s okay.

Maslach: I wish Rachael were here, alive. She could tell all these names.
The first secretary I had, an Asian womanshe was very
forthright and told me that here s what she expected. I was
taken with this wonderful ability of hers to state her career.
She felt this was a turmoil period and what s in it for her. She
kind of gave her conditions, reminiscent of Rachael giving me her
conditions when 1 became dean of engineering. I said, "Gee,
maybe we have a mismatch here." One of the things was she did
not want to take dictation. I was very surprised at that. She
was very good at it, but she felt that she had to move up, and
one of the things was to stop typing or stop taking dictation.
She was very future-oriented, and rightly so. I mean, I m not
against her, but really I understood her and I appreciated her.

We worked on finding her a position that she wanted. That s

really what she wanted. She had been in kind of a dead-end
position there, and she had no supervisory direction or help.
And so she found a position in one of the departments. That s
when I found my second one, who I m quite sure was named
Elizabeth. But then, after she left, why, April Roy became my
secretary and later became my administrative assistant.
 416

April Roy, Secretary and Administrative Assistant

Maslach: April Roy was a wonderful still is person. I guess I m

attracted to people, all of these peopleDavid Brown, Rachael,
April because they re people like me. They re ready to work,
take a job and do something. They are forthright, and they don t
mince around. If you re wrong, they tell you you re wrong
[chuckles], April Roy was a black woman, very active in music in
her church. She sang, played the piano and organ, and she
composed soul music. Later on in her career, she very quickly
latched onto computers and became truly a computer expert for
people in the secretarial-clerical role. She was taken from me
by the head of the computer center, to do this work campus-wide.
She was a great teacher of the computer and how to use it, for
staf f secretaries, typist clerks, and so on.

You know, computers totally wiped away the concept of a

secretary. We just don t do that any more. She understood this
better than anybody I have ever known, better even than the man
who hired her the computer center director. Even the person
from IBM who gave us this big contract when I was provost PROFS,
P-R-0-F-S--that was the name of the research program. It had
nothing to do with professors. It was really professionals.
This was an acronym for this research program, to see how to use
a computer within an academic system. We picked up fifteen
million dollars worth of equipment and expertise from IBM. This
is something I ll get into in the development of the provost
work.

So could see my way clear on academic features.

I I was

knowledgeable of academic changes and so on, and I knew the

proper people to go to Dean Elberg and so on. I knew the people
who were the deans down there in agriculture and forestry, so I
just spent half my time outside of my office, down there,
talking to this group, that group, making sure that they really
knew what they were getting into.

Doing away with an academic department or school or a

college is a big thing. We might want to go back to well, it s
even bigger trying to go back. You don t give up a degree
function or you don t give up something because it may well
disappear forever. I knew this; I was very sensitive to this
because I was the guy who signed off on the College of Mining.
Not the college, but the Department of Mining, excuse me. Mining
academic program. I did away with it.

But I also signed off on being dean of Davis engineering,

which it was, unbeknownst to me for the first few months when I
 417

was dean at Berkeley. So I kind of knew some of the ins and outs
of this thing.

Getting back to your question, which we ve kind of skirted

around, lots of things at Davis came from Berkeleynot just
engineering, not just agriculturea lot of agriculture stuff-
nutrition science, one of their best departments up there, came
from Berkeley. But they also picked up other things. For
example, if you look at botany, they were always strong in botany
at Davis, but they picked up certain things from Berkeley. This
flow to Davis was substantial.

The biggest flow up from the Berkeley campus, of course, was

in the professional schools and colleges before I became provost,
when no longer was medicine taught at Berkeley but all of the
first two years of an M.D. degree was taught here, or at least
the first yearthe basic sciences and biological sciences.
Later chancellors at San Francisco told me it was a big mistake
to move away from the Berkeley campus. M.D. degrees, through,
oh, say the sixties, when the big change with Kerr occurred, was
an M.D. from the University of California at Berkeley and San
Francisco, so we had joint campus degrees worked out.

I also kind of came into the provostship with another

concept, and that is that just like that M.D. degree I was just
talking about, which was before my time, but when we changed over
to the quarter system, we changed a lot of things, such as
getting unit credit for courses that you could take in
engineering if you were in L & S .

One day late in my career in the deanship of engineering,

I m sitting in the office, and my secretary [Lynn Davidson] came
in and said, "There s a student on the line from mathematics. He
really wants to talk to you. He wants to set up an appointment,
but he would like to tell you something or check something out
with you before he does it."

So I said, so I got on the line, and this student of

"Sure,"

mathematics kind of tippy-toed around the subject matter, but I

said, "Wait a while. Let me see if I m hearing you correctly.
What you re telling me is that you, a student that I have never
seen in mathematics, probably has enough course credits in
engineering to be able to graduate from Berkeley with both a
bachelor s degree in mathematics and a bachelor s degree in
"

engineering.

He says, "That s right. You got right to it." He says, "Is

that possible?"
 A18

I said, "You know, I don t know. I ll have to look it up.

I ll have to look at it." .1 told him where I was located.

He said, "There s a bunch of us, about four or five of us,

who are in the same boat."

I said, "How did you ever get into this?"

"Well," he said, re taking more than four years, and we

"we

didn t know what we wanted to do. In the undergraduate L & S

program the first two years, we were undeclared majors. We have
taken five years to get our degree because we didn t make up our
mind about what we wanted to have a major in. A lot of us took
courses in engineering so we had a background there and also in
physicsphysics and courses within L & S. So now that we can
take credit for these courses that we took in engineering, which
before we could not get credit for, we were wondering do we
qualify as a student in another college?"

That was a fundamental question being raised by an

undergraduate student, a senior. I got into it by first finding
out who was in charge, who knows about this stuff. Well, there s
a little-known committee of the Academic Senate which is a
committee on graduation. The professor in charge of that
committee, the chairman of it, was a good friend of mine. He
used to sit and watch the hearts game every once in a while. His
name was Isidor Perelman. He was a professor of chemistry.

I said, "Hey, I ve got a question for you as your job as

chairman of the committee on graduation." I just over the phone
told him what the problem was.

He said, "We re kind of aware of the problem, but we don t

talk about it." [chuckles]

I said, "Has it arisen?"

He said, "Not really. Every once in a while it arises,

but," he said, "you had a student not too long ago that came up."

I said, "Oh, yes, I did." We talked about it. I said,

"What do we do?"

He says, "Why don t you come to meet with the committee?"

To finish up on the double-degree thing, it turns out that

if you re very sharp students and read that little book, which is
the manual you read of all the courses and all the schools and
colleges, true enough, you could have two degrees when you
 A19

graduate. It takes more time usually, but put it this way: If

you take all of your elective units from one college in another
college and thus those elective units in that other college
satisfy all of the degree requirements of the required courses in
that college, then you have satisfied those two requirements--the
degree courses in your college, which you normally are taking,
and all of the degree courses in the other college by use of the
electives .

The thing that sprung this all loose was when I was dean of
engineering--! told you earlierwhen I met with the College of L
& S people, telling them I could not understand why their
students could not take courses for credit in engineering. That
was changed when we went to the quarter system. A lot of things
have changed quietly in the system.

But I did pick up on this guy. Here he was, a student,

telling me, "Hey, is this possible?" Sure enough, it was
possible. So I worked with the committee on graduation matters
and stuff like that. It s a long process through the Academic
Senate because other committees--undergraduate affairs, which is
the key committee in the undergraduate field within the Academic
Senate they had to pass on it.

I ended up, from that point in engineering, looking at this

from the standpoint of departments, and helping departments for
example, materials science and mineral technology didn t have
enough undergraduate load how to get more undergraduate load
with this kind of split degree program. So I was doing what that
math student did, but I was doing it all within the College of
Engineering. How about a degree in mechanical engineering plus a
degree in metallurgy? Do you follow me?

Swent: Yes.

Maslach: Two different departments: mechanical, electrical easy .

Mechanical, civil, and so on. Those don t need the additional

undergraduate activity, but the smaller departments like
nuclear, industrial, materials combined the degrees. And those
combined degrees worked out within engineering. Now, here I was,
working with combined degrees between schools and colleges. That
led me into the College of Agriculture, Forestry in which they
had to do combined degrees. I was getting to a new plateau of
thinking. I mean, my thinking was not simply professional
schools and colleges. I was going across lines. I had a lot of
things to talk about with Rod Park and, of course, with Al
Bowker .
 420

But I m trying to give you the new philosophical way of

operating.

Swent: Women s Studies came in at some point.

Maslach: Oh, yes. That came later.

Swent: Was that later?

Maslach: Yes.

Swent: You were instrumental in that, I understand.

Maslach: Oh, yes. I started getting heavily involved in new academic

affairs, at a new level. One day, totally unbeknownst to us--we

were meeting in cabinet session, and 1 had best describe what a
cabinet was. Bowker had told me very early that he liked to work
with about seven people, no more. These big council meetings-
council of deans is one; twenty-three people. The dean s
conference room is big enough, but that s not his style. So he
selected his cabinet: of course, himself, the vice chancellor,
the vice chancellor for financial matters and the two provosts;
there s five. And then they had the dean of the graduate
division, and the dean of student affairs. That s seven people.
He would have the budget man, Mauchlan, sit in, so you could say
there were eight people in total. But that was it.

That meant that a table three times as long as this one

would not be filled but it would be the chancellor, where you re
sitting, and four people three people onthat s it. You could
talk. It was easy. Everybody knew each other. Everything was
fine .

The Academic Senate Does Away with the School of Criminology

Maslach: One day, we broke up--we met between eleven and twelve, I
rememberSandy and 1 were standing, and Sandy said to me, as
provost he said, "The Graduate Council report on [the] School of
Criminology is coming out. It ll be out this week."

I said, "Oh. Do I get a copy?"

"Sure."

I said, "Fine."
 421

Bowker is standing there. He says, "What does this report

say?"

Sandy is a short man--Al and I are six foot and six-foot-

four, and so we re looking down at Sandy. He kind of pulls
himself up to his full height, and he says, "They think we should
do away with it."

It was the first time Bowker and I had heard this. It was
an academic, separate part of the system, saying they re not
doing their job academically. I want this to be underlined in
the oral history because for so many years during the period that
we did away with it, everybody was screaming that it was Bowker
who wanted to do away with it, that it was I that wanted to do
away with it and so on--all kinds of innuendos. The system
wanted to do away with this. The Regents wanted to do away with
it. Everybody but the fact that the Academic Senate, in its
review of its units, came up with decision it should be done
the"

away with. It rarely comes up with that decision, but it has

done that on a number of occasions historically.

I was suddenly immersed into the problem of doing away with

an active School of Criminology, about a dozen faculty. A fair
percentage of them were lecturers. A number were assistant
professors. Not too many at the tenure level. A couple of split
appointments one with law, maybe two of them with law. With an
assistant professor, whose name went down in history, Tony Platt.
This is something that we re going to be going into next time.
It took about two years of my life to do away with the school, a
program. A number of assistant professors and lecturers leaving
and transferring to FTE or to other units with [the] campus. But
the program was essentially wiped out.

I m trying to give you the kind of environment that I m

walking into as a provost. Just within weeks and months, I m

reorganizing a couple of things over there and over here I m
doing away with--Sandy Elberg--he said it very well. He said,
"You know, these academic reviews are very much like a major
surgical operation. You ve got this big body on this gurney, and
[you re] all cutting inside there, trying to find out what s
going on and finding out what the health or the non-health--"

iit

--finding out what the health or the non-health of the

organization is. And so it s a bloody mess. He says, lot is "A

going on." We have to disassemble everything and look at

everything and see if it works or is not working.
 422

Swent : How often did they do this?

Maslach: Well, I ll get into that how longbut he said, What we do is we

put everything back together and assemble it and everything, and
the patient recovers or maybe not recover, in this casebut the
patient usually recovers. And usually, during the process of
examination, everybody in the organization is getting the word of
what s weak, what s good, what s bad, and so on. And almost all
of the recommendations that we make are of a positive nature,
saying this should be done or that should be done in this new
organization, continuing organization. It s not very traumatic.
But it was, in this case, so bad that we recommend doing away
with the unit.

The review of undergraduate curricula is carried under the

jurisdiction of the Committee on Undergraduate Affairs of the
Academic Senate, and the review of the graduate degree programs
is carried under the Graduate Council s overview. The graduate
dean is the official established by the Graduate Council and the
Academic Senate to carry out this work and to maintain overview
of all graduate students on this campus.

Now, if you have about, oh, let s say eighty departments on

the campus. Each one has a program, and a lot of them have
graduate programs. But they often combine with others-
literature and so on. You re talking reviewing a hundred-plus
programs. You can only do ten, fifteen a year. Therefore, a
ten-year period to review before you come around to a program
again, is about the time, about every ten years, okay?

It s a bloody mess, as Sandy said, but it s the only way the

Academic Senate the faculty, which is the university, can make
sure that each individual unit is up to its standards.

Swent : Is each unit reviewed by people within its own

Maslach: Oh, no, no. The committee appoints a committee this will be a
committee that represents this unit. It also represents
disciplines that are neighbors to it. It s a peer review by a
group which is dominated by people outside of your unit. The
only reason for having people within the unit on that committee
is to get detailed information, but in general you don t like to
have people put in that embarrassing position. So quite often
the committees are faculty totally outside, but neighbors, very
close. If engineering were to be reviewed, you would expect to
have people from chemistry, math, physics, business
administration, law, some people from L & S mathematics, of
course.
 423

I think that we re at a point where we ought to be stopping,

c

Swent : It has been a long session.

Maslach: We re going to get into criminology and other much less

organizational operations and introduce other activities the
chancellor gave to me because when I organized the office, I had
basically a council of deans from the graduate schools and
colleges, but in time, step by step, which I will tell, I had
overview of the office within the chancellor s office for
academic affairs; namely, all the paperwork for appointments,
advancements, procedures for faculty appointments and
advancements .

And I got heavily involved, with time, in rewriting big

sections of the Academic Personnel Manual, which is the bible for
all of us on all campuses. I, more than anyone else
universitywide rewrote sections of this manual.
,

Later on, when we get into the vice chancellorship, all

libraries reported to me, and the computer center, which is a
delightful little story, taking over all computers. So I think,
it s a good time, we re going to say goodbye for today. See you
next time.

Swent : This has been a good, long session.

More Recollections of Nobelists Seaborg and Segre

[Interview 10: March 18, 1999] ////

Swent: Continuing the interview with George Maslach. This is March

18th, 1999, and we have moved to a study room in the Doe Library.

When we stopped last time, you had just begun to mention

about closing down the School of Criminology.

Maslach: I would like to start off, actually, with a couple of

recollections because my mind clicked into gear after our last
session.

Swent: That always happens.

Maslach: I suddenly remembered a couple of incidents. Won t take long to

describe. You asked at the beginning of our last session about
Nobel Prize winners. You especially remarked about social
 424

activity. I realized that my contact with all these Nobel Prize

winners over the years has been personal, but within the limits
basically of the campus. While there are many, quote, "social,"
unquote, contacts, primarily at the Faculty Club, I never
interpreted social in that way. I thought you meant more do we
have dinners at home and stuff like that.

It turns out that a few years ago the faculty who got Nobel
Prizes were people that we actually did see each other in a
quasi- social way, if I can put it that way. For example, Glenn
Seaborg. I always remember when I really got to know him, when
he came back from the AEC [Atomic Energy Commission] he wrote a
,

book, Kennedy, Khrushchev, and the Test Ban Treaty. He sent me a

copy of it simply because we got talking about various things in
our meetings at lunchtime in the Faculty Club. I didn t even
know that he had written such a book. It s a marvelous book
about history of the test ban treaty development and so on. To
have him send me an autographed copy of the book was, I thought,
a very, very personal thing.

Swent: Yes, indeed.

Maslach: One of the other Nobel Prize winners with whom I had contact in a
social sense was Emilio Segre. Emilio won the Nobel Prize with
Owen Chamberlain. Emilio came from Italy, obviously. He was a
professor at Palermo, Sicily. He was a very quiet person and one
who I don t think made friends very easily, but for some reason,
the way I pronounced his name was so Italian that he would ask
Italian people to come over and listen to me when I said his
name .

We got to know each other, and I asked his advice on various

things, one of them being where to stay in Rome with my family
when I went on sabbatical leave. He came with a list of all
kinds of places in Italy where we should visit and stay. In
Rome--we were there during Easter week. He put us up--not put us
up, but he recommended the Pensione Paisielo, which is a
residence turned into a pension in a residential area right on
the Borghese Gardens. It was just wonderful. The kids--aged
eight, ten, and twelvehad this enormous lawn and the zoo and
the boat and the botanical gardens right outside their door. We
didn t have to worry about going out to restaurants. We had
wonderful food, and the prices were very, very reasonable.

We went to several places that he proposed. His family, the

Segre family, were big on paper making. They were probably the
number-one paper producers in Italy at the time. They took the
water from the river just below Hadrian s villa, which is just
east of Rome. I remember driving down that road just simply
 425

because that s the main highway to go there. You could see the
pollution of the river after the paper factory.

One little-known fact about Segre is that he is Jewish, or

was Jewish. His mother was Jewish; his father was Italian, an
industrialist. When he was buried up near the Lafayette
Reservoir, it s just a simple stone block: Emilio Segre,
Physicist--and then the star of David--and that s the only thing
there. Very simple. Obviously, a very dramatic kind of a place
to be buried, and very dramatic stone.

His son, a professor of English, does work such as we re now

doingoral histories and so on. He writes on the history of
technology. He wrote a book called Atomic Bombs and Eskimo
Kisses --Eskimo kisses, the touching of noses. That s what his
father would do when they were having play time. The book
reveals that the son simply never, never understood the father,
the fact that the Jewish background, the period in Europe at that
time, the migration to a strange land--the whole process of being
extraordinarily secretive because of the atomic bomb project and
living in Los Alamos. That s where the son was born. It was not
a normal life, but unfortunately, the son never seemed to
understand his father.

Living with Security Clearances

Maslach: It s a book that s very troubling to me. I could sort of be

sympathetic to Emilio because I know what you have to do when

you re under security clearance. You don t talk. You don t talk
to your wife, you don t talk to anybody, and you get into the
habit of just not talking. It s a security thing within
yourself. The easiest way to be sure you re not talking.

Swent : Did you have that experience?

Maslach: Oh, yes. I talked more often. I would discipline myself, but
when it came to anything that came close to security affairs,
why, I did clam up pretty good. Then what happens is you get
tense and you just clam up, and you just don t say anything. It
was part of my life. That s all. And since we knew people in
the atomic business and all the people in our radar business,
why, this wasn t much of a hindrance. I could work around it.
But I had security clearance through Secret and Top Secret a
couple of times, and then a P clearance for the atomic energy
work. I had security coming out of my ears. I had a registered
office with a locked file cabinet and so on. Had to be a special
 426

locking system. I was happy when a lot of that vanished. It

vanished essentially at the end of my deanship, and I was no
longer into that security business. Got rid of all my classified
files.

Charles and Frances Townes

Maslach: The third Nobel Prize winner that we actually still are quite
close to is Charlie [Charles] Townes and his wife, Frances.
Doris and Frances see or talk to each other quite a bit because
they both have been involved with People s Park problemsDoris
for years on a committee within the university, and Frances on a
committee which involves a group of churches in the area. So we
see each other. We ve been to their house; they ve been to ours.
Stuff like that. Charlie, as you may recallwe talked about
this earlier--! was instrumental in bringing him here to Berkeley
when MIT was going to appoint a new president and he was not the
one that was appointed.

So the contact with Nobel Prize winners was more than just
superficial shaking hands and congratulating the people. It was
kind of fun to meet these people. It s amazing how many of them
--and other people, such as John Whinnery were so active also in
the Washington scene. If you read the citations for the National
Medal of Merit for both Townes and Whinnery, it s amazing how
many major decisions they have been involved in with the United
States government. This Washington scene got to be part of
everybody s life.

Swent : I think that s what that Look article brought out. I had time to
reread that. The new elite were these jet-age professors. This
was a new development, wasn t it?

Maslach: Oh, yes, it really was. If you recall, I also spoke of my

political involvement in the Vietnam War treaty process. I think
I mentioned that the vice president told me told us, actually
that President Johnson has completely isolated himself from
everybody, including the military, which he had totally endorsed.
He was looking to scientists and engineers for advice. That s
the last group he had confidence in. It was kind of a strange
period. You walked into things, not even knowing what was going
to happen. I could still remember that flight home from that
meeting, that set of meetings. I was just numb. I couldn t
believe what was happening.

So much for that.

 427

The Faculty Club Hearts Table

Swent : I have a question about the hearts table, which appears so often
in our discussions. The hearts tablewe ve never said exactly
where it is--it s at the end of the bar area there in the Faculty
Club. Were you eating and drinking there too? Did you only play
hearts?

Maslach: No. Actually, there was a period of time when the card games and
other games were prominent. In the Faculty Club, for example, if
you look at the south dining room, you ll notice what is left of
a mural all around the top edges. You have all of these women in
flowing robes, holding colored balls, which are actually billiard
balls, and playing with them by rolling them on the grass. That
was the billiard room. Four tables. That was quite busy in the
old days. Finally, they moved billiards downstairs, and they had
two tables. Once it was moved, why, -that was the end of it. It
was never used again.

Next to the billiard room, west, is a lounge area. That

room was for cards. Kind of connecting doorway to the billiard
room. People played hearts, they played bridge, but they also
played cribbage, and they also played dominoes.

Swent: You mentioned that.

Maslach: You could have, oh, a couple of bridge tables and a couple of
hearts tables and a couple of other tables as well going on. It
was not a bar then. Of course, this was all during a period of
time when the Faculty Club did not have a liquor license.
Drinking, even after we had a liquor license, was never part of
the playing of cards. It was more of a relaxation process a lot
of hilarity and joking and needling and what have you.

Swent: Was there a particular time for it?

Maslach: Yes. The hard-core people, the senior people who played--Latimer
and in geology; I ll think of his name two or three. They
would get there before twelve o clock and sit down, and whoever
came in filled it out, and then, why, you would sit at another
table if you got more than four people. Latimer was sort of the
center of the game, the dominant figure, in the period up until
he died, which is seventies. The geology professor s name is
Hinds, H-i-n-d-s. He was, oh, a character type. He used to be
flamboyant. Quite a flamboyant lecturer, as well.

Other people. Charlie Tobias was dominant after Latimer.

Werner Goldsmith was there from engineering. In chemistry there
 428

was a large number of people that came. I can t remember them

all right now. Sara Markowitz and Bill Jolly still play. Gene
Petersen is also still playing. But the combination of
engineering and chemistry were the primary people. It has been
kind of a fun game. It s very good, as I said, because you can
get to know people at a, quote, "social" level, unquote.

Incidentally, just as a footnote, I did not recall the name

of the professor of statistics on the search committee, which we
discussed last time. His name is David Blackwell. He has been
called the best statistician of the century. He s quite a man.

Swent : Should we move on, then

Maslach: To criminology?

Swent: Right.

Maslach: Yes. The point that I wanted to make in this statement about
criminology is that everybody thought that this was a vendetta
carried out by Bowker and later myself to get rid of the School
of Criminology, but actually the Academic Senate, in their
review, the Graduate Council, came up with a reportwhich is
still available, if anybody wanted to go to the Senate offices
and find it. The review report stated very, very strongly that
the School of Criminology was not pursuing the goals that were
laid out for it when it was first established. This was
especially true with regard to degree structure and types of
graduate degrees. This was a review by the Graduate Council.
It s a graduate school activity they were supposed to be
pursuing.

When that came to our office, it was a bit of a bombshell.

We started looking at it and reviewing it. It turns out that the
School of Criminology at that time had very few permanent faculty
with tenure. There were some assistant professors, and there
were others at the tenure level who had joint appointments with,
say, law. Therefore, if we did away with the school, there were
very few people--f acuity people, that is that would be hurt by
the whole thing.

We consulted, of course, with the dean of the graduate

division and with the Graduate Council and members of its
committee and the review committee, and we also had some external
reviews from experts in the field of criminology. The decision
was made to just do away with it.

Swent: Were those courses folded into some other areas?

 429

Maslach: Actually, the people with split appointments, especially in law,

moved their course work over into law. There was joint
participation by students in law. Criminology as a name
disappeared, but to a certain degree some work was folded into
the area of what is called jurisprudence. I think that that is
in certain ways more what was appropriate for this campus. The
professional school work that they tried to carry on just simply
wasn t there.

A Disrupting Lawsuit is Brought Over Denial of Tenure

Maslach: It was not a major upheaval, but this was the period of protests,
of course. There were protests made, but nothing of any major
disruption. The major disruption occurred because an assistant
professor by the name of Tony Platt I just suddenly realized you
had better check that name, I m pretty sure I ve got it right,

Platt, not Pratt. But that ought to be checked. He was up for

tenure just during this whole period of being at sixes and
sevens. He was up for tenure just when Heyns had his heart
attack. Everything was delayed for a year, and the whole
process go through the review, the budget committee, and so on--
was then carried out.

I was heavily involved. This is, again, a security problem

because it s something I should not be talking about in terms of
personal effects. But the budget committee had its view, and the
review committee had its view. The end point was that there was
no strong support for tenure in the process, and so the
chancellor has the non-delegatable authority to make a decision.
His decision was that we should not move Platt to tenure.

Platt took it to court. First, of course, he took it to the

Academic Senate Privilege and Tenure Committee, and they
investigated and found that he had no case, so then--he had to do
that, incidentally, first, before he took it to court. Then he
went through Superior Court and went on appeal. Went to Court of
Appeals, statewide, which has three judges. They said that
everything was fine and just remanded it back to the Superior
Court. He, in his appeal, wanted to go to the Supreme Court,
claiming unconstitutional First Amendment right violations.

It took essentially a year out of my nighttime life. We met

with him. He acted as his own attorney. He had a background in
law, but he did not pass the bar in California, so he could not
practice law. But the attorney for the regents and I would sit
down just night after night after night and just, like, every
 430

week for a year. I went to the courts, and I went and listened.
I was asked to do this by Bowker because it was a potentially

explosive situation. The final decision was upheld, all the way
through. He left and practiced teaching elsewhere. He still is
involved in activist issues. You see his name, oh, maybe once a
year or two, twice a year, in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Swent: I think you, yourself, said that you re sometimes known as a

"hatchet
man." This must have been one of the things that
contributed to that reputation.

Maslach: Oh, yes. The thing about being a hatchet man is that you re
going to make enemies if you re in administration. It s
impossible. You cannot satisfy everyone. You have to set your
standards and goals and live up to them; otherwise, you can t
live with yourself, much less your family. I was known as the
man who did away with mining when I was dean of engineering. I

got a lot of flak from that. Of course, I was knownbeing on

the committee that said don t build the SSTs, so the whole
aircraft industry got on my back there.

The criminology issue. As I said, as a school, very few

people were hurt; in other words, tenured people who had split
appointments, just got full appointments elsewhere, so there was
really not a major problem except for assistant professors, who
were terminated.

So the case of Platt was kind of low-key. In that sense, it

was more of an intellectual argument than anything else. Oh, I
guess I was known for that process. But there are many other
things that were occurring at that time.

Implementing Affirmative Action in 1972-1973

Maslach: One of the biggest things that occurred at that time was early
on, incidentally; that means around 72, 3--we were under the
whip of the Office of Civil Rights on affirmative action. This
is very strange, if we want to kind of go through this. If a
campus Berkeley or Stanford has the majority of its research
work funded by technical agencies such as the Office of Naval
Research, then the review of the campus for affirmative action,
etc., accounting, financial accounting is carried out through
that science-based operation within the federal government. For
many years, we were reviewed by the Office of Naval Research.
 A31

When more than 50 percent of the money to the campus comes

from other agencies, such as HEW or Public Health or a variety of
nonphysical science operations, then the reviews and the
accounting is carried out through HEW. The Office of Civil
Rights was located in HEW (Health, Education and Welfare). I was
asked by Mark Christensen just casually one day to sit in on the
meeting with the OC--Office of Civil Rights people who were
there, in the main conference room, the chancellor s conference
room in California Hall.

He said, "Nothing much is going to be done. We re going to

be discussing this. I have to be at another meeting. Can you
sit in?"

Isaid, "Sure." So I sat in. I was appalled. I was

appalled first by the concepts that people had on affirmative
action from the Office of Civil Rights, and I was also appalled
by the fact that there were offices within the campus who really
didn t even think about affirmative action, civil rights, and
they were quite arrogant about it as well.

Nobody had the black hat. Everybody was at fault in some

ways. After sitting in on it that afternoon, why, I saw Mark the
next day. I said, "Mark, this is a big, big problem. We ve got
to gear up. They can really shut us down and cut off the money
flow from Washington, D.C. I really mean this." I explained it
all to him. We had at that time a young woman who was sort of
legal advisor. She sort of operated with no real status within
the system because the regents had control of the legal
operations of the university, and everything was under the Office
of the President. She sat in on it with me and discussed it.
She agreed things had to be done. This could not be done
casually.

I always remember working at that point with affirmative

action. The reason I was chosen was not that I wanted to but
that I had the nominal supervision of the academic personnel
office in the chancellor s office. This is the processing of all
appointments and promotions for faculty. I just sat and thought
it through myself, and then I sat down with a couple of people
that I truly respectedone being Rachael Stageberg, who was my
assistant. This was just perfect for her because it was a big
writing project, and she was truly a professional writer /editor .

She and the head of the academic personnel officeand I ll think

of that name, too, in a momentEdith Scovill started. She was
the first. And then later, another woman, when Edith Scovill
retired.
 432

A Major Civil Rights Report "Smothering Them with Numbers"

Maslach: This conglomerate of the four of us--Rachael and I in my office,

and the two people in the academic personnel office--put together
a report to the Office of Civil Rights which in its finality was
eight inches tall, four sections, each quarter. We, as Bowker
once put it, just smothered them with numbers. We gave the
background history on everything that we had in our files.

The affirmative action process is one which has great

historical problems associated with it--the biggest thing being
the G.I. Bill [National Servicemen s Readjustment Act of 1944],
which brought all of these soldiers back into the university, and
there was no room for women. The number of Ph.D.s for women just
plummeted during the post war periodit was up high during the
war years, and then it just plummeted just after World War II.
These were the people we were hiring. The percentage of women,
when you compared it to ten years earlierhow come? You re
obviously in violation.

Well, it wasn t our violation. It was the legal thing

passed by Congress. It was often to be discussed on a very high
intellectual level, but it got down into very, very minor,
pedestrian discussions a lot of accusations with no evidence, so
we got the evidence. We got all the numbers. These reports came
out the last one was issued on September 1, when Michael Heyman
came into the office as vice chancellor.

We, upon completion of that report, were taken off the list
of violating institutions and we were no longer an endangered
species within the academic world. Harvard and other major
universities on the East Coast Harvard especially just had a
sweetheart contract with their reviewing bodies, which were from
scientific agencies. Stanford was reviewed by a scientific
agency, the Office of Naval Research. They were never in any
major trouble. And yet there was no difference in the record of
all of these major universities.

Swent : The difference was in the reviewing

Maslach: In the reviewing body. The one thing I always remembered to sort
of identify the tone of this group this is the Office of Civil
Rights

Maslach: We had a meeting, one of many in the chancellor s conference

room. The young woman who was the chair extraordinarily gifted
 433

and talented, very nice and we were making good progress on

things. At one point, there was a young man abo it the age of a
sophomore in college, it seemed to me. He was adamant and
vitriolic. He just was adversarial, just pounding me,
especially. Finally, 1 said, "You keep telling me that there are
so many simple ways of increasing minority faculty on this
campus. Just give me one example."

He drew himself up very proudly, and he gave this example.

He said, "You have a music department."

I said, "Yes."

He said, "All you have to do is to concentrate on jazz and

teach jazz. You ll have to hire black people because they re the
only ones who know about jazz."

said, "That s your solution for affirmative action?

I You
change the entire curriculum of the university?" He shut up.

The chair, the young woman, said, "Well just forget about
that. That s off the record." It wasn t, because it was all
recorded. "Just forget we ever said that." She was very angry
with this young man on her staff.

This was the mentality, to change the curriculum. The law

says there s no way you change the curriculum to achieve these
goals. We just had this intellectual problem with the whole
process. Fortunately, by drowning them with numbers and they
were honest numbers; we just showed what we had done over the
years. Then we set up a system of what we were going to do to
review all appointments for assistant professor or tenured
[professors], on affirmative action.

Anne Wright and Nancy Lankhammer at that time, of the

chancellor s office, budget office, put together, with me, a
system. We used green paper, green cards. Basically, you went
through the process of telling why youthis is where that great
word came from--"deselected" people. You have a list of the
people that you searched for and found and interviewed. You had
one assistant professorship that s going to come out of that.
You did not choose this person for that reason, and this person
for that reason, and so on, and finally you end up with the
person you chose.

The deselection validation was done using these green

sheets. We set up this process. Every department chairman,
dean, etc., had to go through it. It was a time-consuming,
laborious thing, but everybody understood what the problem was.
 434

For a period there, I felt very proud of Rod Park and me. We
were the two provosts, and we really believed in affirmative
action, and we really put the screws on people on the
appointments. If a dean sent through a case without the
"greenies," why, it was sent back with no comment, just sent
back. It was incomplete.

A Time-Consuming but Effective Process Achieved 27 Percent

Minority Hires

Maslach: People had to go through the process. It was, as I said, time-

consuming, but it was also very, very effective. The number of
appointments let s take womenwas about 10 percent of all
appointments. That was about roughly what the Ph.D. output was
nationwide, in a big sense. You ve got to watch yourself here
because if you take Ph.D.s in education, the number is much
higher than 10 percent, but if you take engineering or physics,
it s much lower. I guess there s a general number to show what
we did. Ten percent was sort of an index of what had happened
several years ahead of time.

When we were requiring this affirmative action, that number

jumped to 27 percent.

Swent :
Very dramatic.

Maslach: Yes. I remember Rod and me sitting down in his office one day.
I said, re leaders.
"We We re turning out more Ph.D.s in all
these fields. We ought to be asking for more than the 10
percent." We kind of kicked things around. I had kind of a

funny story, statistically, to tell. I said, "Let s do it 10

percent times the square root of two." That s 1.4. So we agreed
to do around 15 percent. That was our goal to do, although 10
percent was the national number that we could always point at and
defend ourselves. We got up to 27 percent.

The wonderful little side issue here--just to show you how

things gomany years later, our daughter, Christina, was head of
the senate committee on the status of women and minorities. She
was chair at one point when they turned out a report. When the
report came out, I got a copy of it. I think she sent it to me.
She actually did not make the connection to my provostship, that
I actuallywith these two young women from the chancellor s
office put together this affirmative action process.
 A35

In the report, one of the conclusions was that "wehave

slipped from the high point of 27 percent in the years" etc.,

etc., down to, oh, maybe 20 percent. I ve forgotten what the

number was. I just called her up. I said, you happen to
"Do

know who was provost and who was head of academic personnel at
that time?" She said, I said, "That s me.
"No." I designed the
whole process." Of course, she just howled with laughter
[chuckles]. Here, our daughter is reviewing my record!
[laughter]

But today it s much, much better. The whole process is

streamlined, and people are more with it. I mean, this is not an
issue any longer.

Swent : Didn t you in fact, though, change the curriculum? I think

women s studies began when you were provost.

Maslach: Yes, women s studies began. That was Provost Rod Park s job.
And also various minorities.

Swent: You are given a lot of credit, though, for advancing--

Maslach: Well, you see, the thing that bothered me when I went to that
first OCR meeting in the chancellor s office was that I had had a
record in engineering. I had written these brochures, I had gone
out personally and visited more than half of all the community
colleges and brought minorities and women here. It wasn t large
numbers, but today we re talking 10, 20 percent probably around
20 percent today in engineering, nationwide. Women. Asian
minorities were never a problem in engineering, but blacks have
become a larger fraction of all engineering.

So I had this background of already doing all these things

at the student level, and so getting on to it at the faculty
level is a real problem because the problem today still exists.
The major problem is we don t have enough minority students, and
women, going for the Ph.D. It s never, I don t think, going to
become 50 percent in all of the disciplines. In some disciplines
it s going to be more than 50 percent women, but you re not going
to get 50 percent women, as an example, in every discipline.

The Difficulty in Getting Women Chemistry Professors

Maslach: So what do those departments do? Well, they just have to produce
the women themselves. But then we have a stricture against
appointing our own Ph.D.s, for good reason. You take chemistry,
 A36

which had really the greatest problem in affirmative action,

within the professional schools and colleges. You don t realize
this, but chemistry college turns out of a lot of women Ph.D.s.
The question was how come you don t hire them? If there are so
many out there, how come you don t hire women?

I was on their back for years. At one point, I asked the

dean if I could have the names and addresses and phone numbers of
all these people. Then what I did was I made a personal survey
of every woman that they interviewed over a period of, say, five
years. I made a hundred phone calls, easily. I found out what
were the problems with regard to women coming here at Berkeley.

Unfortunately, it s a legit problem from the standpoint of

chemistry. They pride themselves on having their faculty work in
the laboratory, like a T.A. [teaching assistant] Glenn Seaborg
worked in the laboratory, right up to his last years here. But
the women, especially, knew that they were under the gun to make
tenure, and working in a laboratory takes a lot of time. And so
they just objected to that. Then they had some other kind of not
as simple curricular reasons. But 1 got all these reasons from
all these women, as to why they turned it down.

Swent : Turned down?

Maslach : An assistant professorship here. They would not come. Just to

make it a little humorous, one of the biggest problems we had
during this time was to find jobs for the husbands of women
f aculty--just the reverse of what had been earlier. But earlier
there were not Ph.D. wives, but here many of the men were Ph.D.s,
so what kind of a job could he get? This was a real problem. I
know of several cases where we just couldn t get the woman to
come. It was very sad, but that s the way it went.

Anyway, that was one of my big accomplishments during the

provostship. We kind of passed that by, but it just kept
recurring. It kept coming back. You had to pay attention to it.
It was not my idea of what I should be doing as provost, but the
vice chancellor really had so many other duties that it kind of
fell between the cracks.

During this time, the chancellor was able to get a full-time

legal assistant, and we ve had that man ever since. Each campus
has that legal advisor to the chancellor.
 437

Getting State Funding for University Buildings and Equipment

Maslach: About the same time, an awful lot of people were recognizing the
problems of the funding for the university. Much of the funding,
of course, was presentations from the chancellor s office,
through the president s office, making presentations before the
Senate Finance Committee or senate legislative analyst up in
Sacramento. I got into that--at first, through the problem of

buildings. We had, in engineering and other colleges within

professional schools and colleges, less than the amount of space
that we deserved by the formula of the legislation.

I got going up and down to Sacramento on this and got to be

quite friendly with Senator Roberti, who was a big power in those
days in the Senate. Term limits moved him out of the Senate, and
he is now doing something else. We seemed to have good contact.
Also, a couple of the senior staff members of the legislative
analyst s office. Alan Post was the main legislative analyst
during that time. I got into a quasi-political situation because

you re up there, talking to people, and they always would say-

not this bluntly, but "What does this do for me and in my
district?" It was sort of a not-in-my-backyard and in-my-
backyard type of discussion with a lot of legislators.

I had to kind of push the university as a whole, rather than

just what 1 was going to do. 1 was kind of proud of my

presentations because the vice president who was in charge of

the budget recently retired Bill [Baker? --I 11 think of it
]

again. He would just make the announcement to the Senate finance

committee, and Bill and his staff would just walk out, and 1
would be there all alone, making my presentation [laughs]. Out
of that, I was able to get an optometry building, and 1 was able
to get funding for Public Health. This was a medical sciences
bond issue that had passed in the state. But I also worked on
other aspects of the building program.

At the same time, 1 was always very impressed with how bad
our equipment was for laboratories. I ll just take chemistry
because it, to me, was the most dramatic. They were still using
beam balances that date back to 1900. Beam balances take a lot
of time to use to get an accurate reading. It s an art learning
how to use those old beam balances. There had been complaints
about that .

One day I approached Frank Ketcham, who was in the budget

office, the chancellor s office. What he did was pull out of the
computer basically a listing of all of our undergraduate
laboratory equipment and its age. Every piece of equipment is
 438

identified; it has a serial number. It s in the record. That

record was one of the most horrible statements of decline of this
university that I have ever seen. I could take anybody at that

time to community colleges right next door, the wealthy ones down
on the [San Francisco] Peninsula, and in the laboratories, their
equipment was so much better than any that we had, in physics and
chemistry and engineering. You couldn t believe it. No one had
put any time into doing something about it.

Well, this is not professional schools and colleges. This

was campus-wide. Frank and I got together. 1 have to give him
total credit for doing all the hard work, but basically we came
up with a program to replace all the old equipment over a period
of years. We couldn t get it all in one year, which would be a
very large sum of money, but we figured to spread it over, say,
five years. And we did. When I made the presentation for this
as a budget item, it was accepted immediately. The committee
voted unanimously. In fact, they just cut my presentation short
because they knew that it was all good purpose.

We got money. Oh, it was in the millions of dollars for

each provost.

Swent : This was from the state?

Maslach: From the state, to replace teaching equipment at the

undergraduate level. We did well. Immediately, in a subject
like chemistry, which had the largest problem within the
professional schools and colleges, would get a third to a half a
million dollars each year. We were really doing a good job.
Everybody in Sacramento--also the president s of f ice--thought
this was great. They went to Los Angeles and other older
campuses and instituted the same thing. It became a standard
budget item, replacement of this equipment. That was a major
contribution I made to my Sacramento scene in that regard.

At the same time, if you really looked at what was happening

within higher education and especially within the state, we were
getting less and less money from the state, and we were getting
more money from the federal government. We were getting more
money from agencies within the state, for research and public
service, but our basic teaching concept of this statewritten
into its constitutionwas sliding down the drain. It was really
moving quite badly.

I thought that when Jerry Brown came in that there might be

a change there, but when Brown came in, it was even worse. He was
a believer in smaller is better, and we took more of a beating
from Jerry Brown than we did from previous administrations,
 439

including Republican administrations. The [following] Republican

administration, under Deukmejian, was very strong in favor of the
university and its budgetary problems.

We here at Berkeley had the Berkeley Foundations, and we had

a private giving program, which, when Bowker became chancellor,
pulled in $4 million a year, which is quite a small amount. It
was overwhelmingly for scholarships and things like that--
scholarships in the memory of somebody, and so on. The
foundation had a board of directors that had overview on the
fundraising operation, which was under the direction,
incidentally, of Dick Erickson, who had been head of the Alumni
Association for years and in the thirties was a quarterback on
the football team, so he was well known. If I may point out, I
think the athletic programs were getting a large piece of money
because of the alumni and the Bear Backers [alumni sports
supporters] .

But Bowker wanted to change things; he got the board of

directors to authorize a review of fund raising in general at the
university levels and UC in particular. This was under a famous
organization still in effect, Peat Marwick and so on. There are
about four names. Peat and Marwick, I think, are still in there,
but the other names keep changing. It s a national organization
that does reviews for industry and commercial operations.

They came up with a report. One day I ll digress a little.

I have to explain to you my relationships with Bowker here.

Bowker, living at University House, would walk over in the
morning and go to work, and I would drive down and park and go to
work. My office was on the opposite end, the north end of
California Hall, and his was in the south end. We were
diametrically opposed. There were numerous times during all the
years I spent there in which Bowker would come into the
secretary s office and ask--or quite often not even ask; just
say, he in?" And whichever secretary at the timeApril Roy
"Is

being a good examplewould just nod. He would just go to my

door and open the door.

He opened it so quietly, and he walked with crepe-soled

shoes, and he was so quiet, he could be in my office, just
standing there, and I wouldn t know he was there. I would be

working, maybe dictating. Finally, I would sense something was

there [chuckles]. I would look around, and there was Al Bowker.
That was a joke between the two of us I said, "My, you are
.

quiet."
 440

One day he came in in the morning and said, "What are you
doing this afternoon?"

I said, "Nothing that can t be changed."

He said, d like to have you sit in with the Berkeley

"I

Foundation board of directors. We want to discuss changing our

giving programincrease private funding for the university,
Berkeley campus."

I said, "Sure." I said, "What do I need to know?" He

tossed this thin reportbig report from Peat Marwick Mitchell
or whatever.

I read it sometime that morning, and then I attended a

meeting which was in the chancellor s conference room. A

discussion of that report was to be on at about two o clock.
Well, it turns out that I knew half the people on the board.
Gene Trefethen was a member, and he was very active with us in
engineering. And a couple of others. But I would say of the
seven members of the board, I probably knew personally four of
them, so I was in good condition to walk in and meet with them.

Chancellor Bowker Changes Campus Funding by "Unleashing" Colleges

Maslach: Now, $4 million when Bowker started. When he left, annual giving
was around $50 million. He was the man that made the basic
structural changes within the campus, and the campus thinking.

In the report, there were two recommendations. If the

campus wants to get started on a giving program which is new and
different and bigger, it either has to go the route of many
universities and have a large-scale, multimillion-dollar giving
programand this is something that Stanford is in the middle of
right now, and we are also, here; we re talking now the billion-
dollar level over years. You either set up a big program,
"x"

for which you have to have a big staff and professional people
outside to do this, et cetera. That s what you do.

I gave examples of the successful programs back East. You

have to remember, the Midwest and the West Coast are heavily
land-grant colleges, and therefore public institutions are not
expected to ask for private money. We had a big family argument
on this because my wife s cousin was vice president of Stanford,
financial affairs, and he just lectured me with vehemence on this
point. I pointed out that they get a lot of public money from
 AA1

the state and the federal governments, but that didn t seem to
make any difference.

The second recommendation, if you don t go for the big

program, was to, quote, "unleash" the professional schools and
colleges to develop programs with their alumni. This report
recognized, without saying it in so many words, that there is an
enormous loyalty of the alumni of I ll take engineering to this
College of Engineering. This turns out to be quite true of all
of the departments. You remember yourself not so much as a
member of the campus; you remember that your home was the
department of English; your major was English. That s where your
loyalty is. Engineering why there was engineering.
,

After the whole thing was over, I met the next day, I think
it was, with Bowker. I said, think we can unleash the--." He
"I

didn t want the big program, so think we can unleash the

"I

colleges." I was a little wrong on this because not all of them

really liked the idea of going out and raising money. But I
proposed in a week or so of thinking about it 1 proposed that
we fund let s take engineering, where it was the most
successful by giving engineering enough money to have an office.
That was $30,000 a year, we came up with. And other areas,
$40,000. I think the most we ever gave anybody was business

administration, $50,000 a year.

Bus. Ad. went to private giving and developing funded

professors, name professors, endowments. That was their push.
Engineering was much broader. They went for that, but they also
went for a lot of other kinds of money, in research. For
example, every assistant professor in engineering gets two months
of research funding while he s an assistant professor. That s
pretty damn good, considering what we had to go through years
ago. That s wonderful. That helped our recruiting enormously.

I went to the deans of the professional schools and

colleges, made this announcement to all of them. A number of

them were for it; a number of them were against it. I could not
convince people who were against it, although with time, later
on take chemistry, who did not go for it immediately. Later on,
they saw what engineering was doing, and they went and used the
staff in engineering s office and essentially borrowed time and
developed their own giving program, which has ended up
essentially what we would have done ten years earlier if
chemistry had been willing to go after private giving. In fact,
their last two buildings the last building especially was
totally privately funded.
 442

Most of the buildings now--33 percent of the campus s

buildings for instruction are privately funded. It became a
major effort. It was very easy to convince engineering. Ernie
Kuh was dean, and he was all for it, and we were in the midst of
developing a student center in engineering. We had our eyes on
the Bechtel family and the Bechtel Corporation for that
engineering center.

With various degrees of success, and since we re in a

library, I d like to point out that librarianship, a very, very
small professional school at that time, raised a very large
amount of money, simply because they put on a symposium relating
to a major professor years and years ago, and his work and his
influence. A woman attended, alumna. She was living in northern
California. She had been a librarian in some small town up
there. She said,
"If
you people need some money, why, contact
me." The dean didn t understand. To cut the story short, she
married one of the wealthiest lumbermen in the state of
California, and she was worth a lot of money. She at some point,
I think, gave on the order of a million dollars. She supported
them with small things until they got used to the fact that she
had a lot of money [chuckles]. She did a wonderful job helping
the school of librarianship--now information sciences.

The same thing happened with other small schools.

Journalism had good funding, at a low-key level. When they moved
into North Gate Hall, why, they were able to do a lot of things
there in the physical environment. But engineering was the star
of the show. Engineering for years raised more than 50 percent
of all the private money that was raised on this campus. And I m
not talking small dollars.

Maslach: Engineering would pull in on the order of $50 million in a given

year. I remember one year, because my name, because I was

provost, was on an IBM gift which ended up to be $15 million over

a period of time. But we got all kinds of equipment as well as
money directly.

Swent : The buildings are the more conspicuous evidence.

Maslach: Well, that s the single biggest thing; however, the support of
faculty is very good and the endowed chairs is very good in that
regard.

I want to give a more historical background on this.

Various schools and colleges did well; others refused to get
involved. They all thought of fund raising as going to your
 443

alumni and asking them for five dollars or so each, and stuff
like that. That s just not the way you do it. You work with
corporations. This kind of ties in, fund raising, with Al Bowker
and his ability to get people to do this. I remember one time we
were talking in my office, just casuallymaybe his office--!
don t know. I used to see him in his office every week,
regularly, for just discussion of agenda items we both came up
with.

He was in the middle of raising money for the library in

Chinese studies. He had wealthy donors potentially available in
the Bay Area Chinese community. At one point, he said to me, "I

just hate to ask for money."

Obtaining Funding for the Bechtel Student Center

Maslach: I said, have a little experience of this." I developed a

"I

technique which is very simple. I just have a proposal and have

a budget sheet on the end, and I give the proposal to the people:
this is what we want to do. I don t ask them for money. Never.
Let them make up their mind what they can contribute. In other
words, put the onus of the decision on the part of the giver. It
works out very well because then the giver feels that they re
involved, and you let them know there are certain kinds of ground
rules. For example, 50 percent of the budget, and the building
is named after you, or something like this.

He liked the idea, and I remember it was a small amount of

money, on the order of I want to say $50,000, which is small,
compared with the millions that were raised. He went over to a
luncheon meeting in San Francisco, and he came back, and he
didn t just slip into my office quietly. He came back. He had a
check for $50,000, the total amount he was putting in the
proposal. Didn t ask for it specifically. He says, works!
"It

Look!" [chuckles)

Al and I got to be quite close in this regard because the

next fund raising we wanted to do was Bechtel Corporation. Al
realized that he should be in front on that one because the
Bechtel family is a big operation within the Bay Area. It
shouldn t just say the Bechtels give only to engineering or
something like that. Same way with the Haas family. They do so
much for the entire campus, not just business administration.

He agreed to make the presentation at Bechtel and he went by

himself. I didn t expect him to ask me, but I think that other
 444

people in engineering thought that they might be asked to give

background information. I had sort of lost touch with the
project. He went over there, and he came back. I remember he

phoned, and he said, "Come over to the house." This is something

that I used to do every once in a while. I m sure other people
did it as well. He had a little office in the house. Of course,
University House is a beautiful place to sit. An alcove that
faces to the west. Why, that s where we d sit and have a drink
and talk.

He came in. It was late. He told us that everything was

accepted, and they looked at it and they were all for it, the
Bechtel Center. Everything was hunky-dory; everything was moving
smoothly, he said, but they didn t give any indication of an
amount. We talked it all over, but he was sure that it was a
very, very successful presentation. Within days, the Bechtel
family--Steve Bechtel, Sr., at that timesent a letter, listing
the donation of the family, the corporation, and various members
of the corporation who ponied up large amounts of money half a
million dollars for this man, and so on. They had about two-
thirds or three-quarters of the Bechtel Center all budgeted, all
paid for. Of course, there was great joy within the chancellor s
office and, of course, within engineering because they had been
struggling with this whole problem for a number of years.

This is the way that the whole process went through. It has
had all kinds of ramifications. For example--! made the
statement earlier, which was wrong, that I got an optometry
building. I did, but I got the state to pay for it, the state

legislature; but they put a restriction. They said no equipment,

just a bare-bones building. So privately, the optometry alumni-
one meetingmillions of dollars over a two-year period. That s
the most beautiful building inside you ve ever seen. The
equipment is just out of this world.

Those kinds of donations made not just by alumni but by

organizations, by individual corporations and so on. It s
amazing what was done in the private giving, once it got down to
the grass-roots level. Bowker s genius was to take it from the
campus level, where we had an office over there in North Gate
Hall, and now get it down into the dean s level, the department
level. And that s what really paid off.

L & did not really move in this area.

S It was not
indicated in the report that I told you about because they found
that in other institutions, colleges of letters and science are
such a large, non-homogeneous grouping that it did not have that
loyalty. The loyalty is to the department. Now if you look at
what L & S does, it is at the department level. I regularly get
 445

from math, physics, requests simply because I m on their donation

list somewhere. That I think was a major, major achievement that
went beyond engineering, of course, and went to the total campus.

I m trying to give you sort of a framework of what the hell

a provost did in those days. We were putting out fires, like the
Office of Civil Rights, affirmative action. We were doing major
changes, such as developing money. And I was influencing
curricula at each of the schools and colleges by going down and
talking with themor up there and talking with them. In other
words, my technique was to visit them on their turf. I got quite
friendly with the agriculture-forestry amalgamation.

Of course, engineering--! was always up there. Not that I

ever intruded. I want to make that point. I went only when I
was requested to come. I have a very big thing about not

interfering with any administrator that follows me. If they come

and ask, why, then I ll talk.

But I spent a lot of time with chemistry and most of the

time with the individual, smaller, schools and colleges, like
journalism, librarianship, and so on. They just needed more
hand-holding in this regard.

The School of Social Welfare Gets Accreditation After All

Maslach: A story, just to give you an idea: [The School of] Social Welfare
under Dean [Milton] Chernin had run into bad times. During these
periods of our troubles, why, the alumni group in the Bay Area-
Social Welf are issued a report condemning the school for not
taking more liberal actions and not doing things--! mean, it was
almost like a protest report, a report from a group of
protestors. You could see their sensitivity. You know where
they re coming from, but it was not a very useful report. The
Graduate Council also reviewed Social Welfare about the same
year, and they came quite negative, but they did not have any
major things that they were talking about.

At the same time, the national accreditation came up for

review. That s usually every ten years or five years, depending
upon how good you are. The national accreditation group came in.
These are faculty from a variety of schools. The usual thing is
to have an exit interview with the chancellor. Okay. So they
came over on a Friday afternoon about two o clock, and we had a
fine coffee meeting with the chancellor in his office. They gave
their results. The results were that accreditation should be
 446

held back. In other words, Social Welfare at Berkeley should be

put onto a provisional type of accreditation, and they should be
doing certain things to improve, etc. That was the gist of the
report .

I was really kind of turned off by the people on this

committee. They were bombastic, aggressive, very assertive, very
adversarial. Bowker, of course, was, in his usual quiet mood,
taking it all in. I was the point man to respond. We got to
kind of a quiet point, and I said, "Well, is that it? Is that
the way the report is going to be--." They re giving us a
preview of the report, basically. They said, I said,
"Yes."

ve been sitting here thinking, and the alumni locally condemn

"I

the school, the Graduate Council of our Academic Senate

essentially condemn the school, and now you as a national body
condemns the school. Maybe we ought to just do away with the
school."

We had just done away with criminology the year before.

These people just--oops! You could see the change in their
faces. They thanked me, and I ushered them out, and went back in
with Bowker, and I said, "Did I say the right thing?" He said,
So we just waited.
"Yes." Two days later, I got a phone call.
The report had been rewritten, and the School of Social Welfare
had a full ten-year accreditation.

Swent: For heaven s sake!

Maslach: This was kind of the inside workings of a provost. I just felt
that we ought to stir things up. About that time, Chernin
reached retirement age, and so we were able to make changes
within the school, but in an orderly fashion, following the
report of the Graduate Council. The alumni report was just a
knee-jerk reaction of ultra-liberals, maybe, although it really
was not of any usefulness to us. The accreditation report was of
no value at all. We just changed things. We got a bunch of new
assistant professors in there, and that was it.

One of the things that both Rod and I insisted on--I

especiallywas that we have minimum of appointments at the
tenure level. Prove your worth while you re here. If you buy a
tenured professor from some major university, people remember him
or her as the tenured professor from University X or Y. We
wanted to have assistant professors in general as the majority of
the new appointments. That s what we were able to do. I don t
know what it is now. I lost touch. Everything has changed
because we ve had all the retirements, the voluntary retirements,
the VERIP program. I don t know just how that office of academic
 447

personnel operates today, but I m giving you essentially what I

did when I was there.

The Work of the Budget Committee on Academic Personnel Matters

Maslach: One of the jobs for both Rod and me was to work with the budget
committee, which is on this campus kind of a misnomer. Other
campuses call it the academic personnel committee or something of
that nature, which is more descriptive. I would have regular
sessions downstairs, where the budget committee is located, on
the first floor of California Hall. We would discuss cases. If
you look at the report of the budget committee every year in the
Academic Senate report system, there are so many appointments
made, so many advancements made, so many promotions, etc.
There s always a reckoning given in each of these appointments ,

tenure, non-tenure, chancellor s position, agreement, and so on.

Remember, the budget committee is required to give advice to

the chancellor, and the chancellor makes the decision. What you
try to do is to minimize the number of confrontations and/or the
number of disagreements. If you look carefully, you ll see that
they are usually down at the one or two level for the year.
Maybe one here, one there. Actually, in the professional schools
and colleges, when I first became provost, the disagreements were
quite large. I m talking five or so per year. So I made it a
point, and I did all these things to improve the situation. I
was welcomed down there. It was never an adversarial thing. I
knew everybody on the committee personally. The year that Bill
Fretter was chairman, why, Bill and I knew each other for years
before .

Tom Flanagan in English, when he was professor and was also

chair of the committee. He was a wonderful person.

Swent: What was that name?

Maslach: Flanagan, a great author. The first major book that he wrote- -he
left the university and went to New York. He s absolutely
devoted to the Irish cause, and the Irish community in New York
is where he blossomed. The Year of the French was the first
volume, which was a major prize-winning novel, documentary novel
--put it that way. That s when the French invaded Northern
Irelandmany years ago. But he wrote so beautifully. He s
truly an author--! would read his work and I would read a
paragraph and I would just stop and admire it and go back to the
 448

beginning of the paragraph and read it over again. His writing

is just fabulous, just a flow that you cannot believe.

Louise Clubb was chairman- - she s from Italian, comparative

literature so we always had good feelings. 1 remember when I
first came there, the first meeting with the budget committee,
I m essentially making my position known on the case, which is in

opposition to their position. There was a faculty member who was

from English. He was sitting next to me. I said, m sure glad
"I

that I m able to come and visit with the budget committee."

He says, "You re not visiting the budget committee. You are

ordered to appear." [laughs] We all laughed, of course. He
meant it as a joke. He was being very flamboyant, but that sort
of gave a tone of humor to the whole situation, and we were able
to discuss cases individually.

Let s say in a given year there are six cases in which we

really have some fundamental differences. Why, by this
discussion process and working hard, really, by going back and
getting materials and so on, I would get them to change their
position on, say, two; they got me to change my position on two.
It doesn t work out numerically, but basically while I was
provost we never had more than one or two disagreements with the
chancellor s office.

Improving Appointment Procedures in the Academic Personnel Manual

Swent: This was a change from previously?

Maslach: Oh, yes, cutting it down from maybe five or seven, down to two.
The point I m making is we improved the relationship of the
Senate and the chancellor s office. The one point of contact,
which is enormous, is the appointment of new professors and their
advancement. We were able to do good things at that point. I
contributed mightily for a number of years into the rewriting of
the Academic Personnel Manual, which was about two inches thick.
Section 50, 52--that area is the appointment procedures and
process. I got a number of things across that were later adopted
system-wide. In this manual.

For example, when I was in engineering, I remember a

professor--! just could not understand his research. I thought
he was sort of a dilettante. What I did was I said, "Hey, send
me a memo through your chairman of your research and what you re
doing and why you re doing it. What s the importance of what
 449

you re doing? Is there a direction in here? I don t see any

direction."

He said, "Don t worry." He sent this memo. It made

everything crystal clear. He was doing something with a long-
term view that was not apparent if you just looked at one paper
or another. And so I appended this to his case and used it in my
commentary as I sent it forth to the chancellor s office.

When I became provost, I said, Hey, this is a technique that

I think every faculty member has a right to do; namely, to review
his own career and say what he did and why he did it. The budget
committee thought that was the greatest idea since sliced bread.
That immediately became something. It was incorporated in the
Academic Personnel Manual very, very quickly.

This is the kind of thing that I -had an overview from my

previous knowledge of being on review committees, first; two,
being a chairman and preparing a case; three, being a dean,
reviewing a case; and now being provost, reviewing a case. With
all that experience of all these different levels, I saw where
there was a communication block. The main thing was with regard
to getting something directly from the professor. The professor
knows the seventh year he s going to be reviewed in the eight-
year period of assistant professorship, assuming there are no
accelerations. At the end of the seventh year, he s told.

I had one very sad case. It was actually in a college that

people are still around, so I won t mention people s names. But
basically, they did not know what this guy was doing. There was
a changeover in chairmen, and then there was another quick
changeover because of an illness in the chairman or a death--! ve
forgotten what. So there was just no communication. I
incorporated another idea that I had, and that is to improve
communications .

Learning from Experience the Power of the Carbon Copy

Maslach: For example, if the response from the chancellor s office back to
the dean is negative, what I did was I required the dean to share
this information with the department chairman and the professor
that was being reviewed. I can tell you that there were years in
which that was never done. I told you early on, the years here
at Berkeley, I learned that I was appointed associate professor
from the custodian of the building that I had my office in,
because he had read in the morning, early, the announcement which
 450

was printed at that time. Sure enough, on the second page of

that announcement was my name as associate professor. I never
received anything in writing. Nothing!

What we received later, in those early days, was a contract,

which you had to sign. We signed a contract, a big sheet of
parchment-type paper, and we signed a yearly contract. That was
really strange.

Swent : No communication.

Maslach: You heard about it maybe a month afterwards, you know? You know
you re up for review. If you did not make it, you want to start
looking for a job elsewhere. It was just horrible the way this
whole thing was done. This communication technique I used was
the power of the carbon copy. There was a carbon copy of this
statement of mine. Went to the chairman, went to the dean, and
so on. But I did not send them. I sent them all to the dean,
"Please forward these, unless you find something wrong that you

want to talk to me on." I had this multiple carbon copy, which

is one of my techniques of administration I popularized, and
people are still using it.

That is if you really want to rouse the level of interest

and stop people who are being nasty or negative in a way that you
cannot counter, what you do is publicize something by writing a
memo and sending carbon copies to everybody! I m talking fifty
carbon copies. All of a sudden, what you said in the memo is
what has happened. You give them the background. This is it.
That s what the record shows. Everybody shuts up. Really, it
works.

I know [Chancellor Chang-Lin] Tien used to ask me for and

used to get all these administrative techniques. He called me
his role model.

Advising Chancellor Chang-Lin Tien on Streamlining Procedures

Swent: Do you think these come from your engineering training?

Maslach: Well, I think there s a lot to that. It s not just engineering.

The physical sciences in general have this technique. The
scientific method is applied to bureaucratic monstrosity. A lot
of things you cannot change, unfortunately, but there are a lot
of things you can change. Certainly, you can change everything
within your office.
 451

The most famous thing I did for Tien was I told him, "You
never read a memo twice." By that I meant you don t pick it up,
put it down, and later pick it up and put it down and so on. I
demonstrated this for Mark Christensen as well. I say just take
all the material that comes in in the mail and put it down.
Hopefully, you have someone like Rachael who had organized
everything in terms of importance. All the catalog junk is down
at the bottom [chuckles).

Swent : I would like to think that as provost you wouldn t get that sort
of thing.

Maslach: By that kind of junk I mean stuff you read and throw into the
circular file [chuckles]. I said, "Here s what you do. You just
sit down and you read this memo, and then the first thing you do,
you make up your mind, can you answer it? Do you need to get
more information? Is this memo something for you to answer?
Maybe it doesn t require an answer." -But I would always initial
it when I read it. This was the first time anybody in the
chancellor s office ever did that.

Swent: Really?

Maslach: Yes. Everybody kind of laughed at that at the beginning, but

then they realized how important it was. And then I would jot
down a thing and then give it to my assistant to take action on.
Or I would pick up the phone. I was a great one for doing all my
own phone calling. All the people outside, the secretaries,
would always be surprised. It was the provost, himself, calling.
They would say, ll send it to Rachael or to April."
"I

I said, "No, send it right to me."

Getting involved personally was a very important trademark

of all my administration. You just have to learn. As I told you
earlier, I once walked over to mechanical engineering and I was
by myself, just looking around. All of a sudden, a rumor got
started that I was going to take space away from mechanical
engineering. So you can set up panic situations if you don t do
things correctly.

Yet there were times when I went and saw Hans Einstein, and
had this wonderful talk with him. The first time a dean ever
came to his office. Well, you would like to try to do more of
this, and I did spend a lot of time outside of the office, going
up to journalism. The smaller schools and colleges were not as
paranoid, but some of the larger ones were. I know going down to
forestry and agriculture I had problems a couple of times.
 452

Planning for Succession in University Administration

Swent : Did you do anything about grooming a successor?

Maslach: No, no, no. I did not groom a successor, but I have a story to
tell you about that. When Bowker left I ll start with that
story. There s two stories wrapped into one. One day, I m
sitting in the cabinet, which is, a; I told you, seven or eight
people with Al Bowker. There was some kind of a dull
presentation being made. I started looking around. I suddenly
realized that next to me was Sandy Elberg, who was a couple of
years older than me. Across from me was the vice chancellor for
finance. He was Bob Kerley, and he was a couple of years older
than me--one year, maybe. And over here was I ve got a block on
the name. Oh, vice chancellor for student affairs. I ve already
mentioned him earlier. He was about a year younger than I was.
I knew Bowker and I were exactly the same age.

So you had Heyman and Park were both younger by a ten-year

kind of a span. I was thinking. After he got to the end, "Does
anybody have anything else to discuss?"

I said, "Yes, I would like to throw out a piece of new

business. I m just sitting here and looking around, and, you
know, there are five people here" I think it was six at the
time--oh, [Errol] Mauchlan he was our age. So we had all these
people. Mauchlan was budget [financial services], not student
affairs. At any rate, I said, "There s six out of eight here who
have a birthday within a year or so of each other. When we all
retire, there s going to be a hell of a vacuum. There s going to
be a major change."

I was looking at Bowker at the time. He looked at me, and

you could just see recognition in his eyes that there was a
problem. I said, "Why don t we just have a come to Jesus
meeting and just all sit down and say what we re going to do,
when we re going to retire, and so on."

He looked at me I love that man he says, "No, George, I

think I ll talk separateley to each one of you." [laughs]

Swent: So that s how you started.

Maslach: I started discussions, different people directly with Bowker, of

course. What you wanted to do when you wanted to retire. I said
I wanted to retire a couple of years earlier. Well, it turned
 453

out that Al had an agreement with his wife, Rosedith, just the
most wonderful person. She was working at Stanford. When her
retirement process, which is separate from the University of
California, obviouslyhis retirement process, which is now
embedded in the university- -they had come to an agreement to
retire when a certain date appeared. I forget when it was. It
was earlier because Heyman became chancellor.

He told me about his retirement. Mine would be roughly a

year or so later. We all agreed, and everybody worked with him.

Norvel Smith was the vice chancellor for student affairs.

So everything was worked out very pleasantly. We came up to

the point of having to find a new chancellor and going through
the process of a search committee. There was lots of thought
given to this by a lot of people, including the Regents. Do you
need an outside man or an inside man? We went through this
earlier, when we were on the search committee for Bowker. What
kind of a man do you need, or a woman? We had all kinds of
searches going on.

don t think there was any big competition within the

I

operation. I do know that at that time it was common knowledge

that Mike Heyman had been interviewed by the regents for the
presidency of the university, which did not, obviously, come to
fruition--for reasons, some of which--! don t know. I really did
not keep much contact with that.

Park and Heyman were obvious choices for chancellorship

here. If you may recall and you might get the dates squared up,
but Rod Park went to the University of Colorado, where he was
acting president. After a short time, he became president of
Colorado, and just this last year retired as president of
Colorado .

Eighty-three was when I retired. Bowker retired around 81.

Swent : So the president who was named when Heyman would have been
considered, that was [David] Gardner?

Maslach: Gardner, right.

Swent : He came in in 83.

Maslach: Yes.

Swent :
No, no, it must have been earlier. [David] Saxon was 75 to 83.
 454

Maslach: I was actually on--not a short list, but I was one of the people
interviewed by the Regents for the presidency when Saxon came in.

Swent : When Saxon came in. Was Heyman interviewed at that time?

Maslach: No, no. Heyman was not very visible at that time.

Swent: I see. He became chancellor in 80, and Gardner became president

in 83.

Maslach: Right.

Swent: And Park was provost at the same time you were.

Maslach: Yes.

Swent: And then left for Colorado.

Maslach: So, to get back to your question did I groom anybody, Mike Heyman
came to me when he was chancellor and asked me if I knew of
people who would be good for the provost position. Mike was very
big on affirmative action. I must give him great credit. When
he was chancellor (I m kind of overlapping here a little) --

Swent: Yes. You continued as provost?

Maslach: I continued as vice chancellor for research and academic services

for two years.

Swent: Yes, but when Heyman came in, you moved from provost to vice
chancellor.

Maslach: Yes. He asked me if I had any suggestions. I was the one that
recommended, if I can put it that way. I said, "You ought to
look at Doris Galloway." She had been doing a very fine job in
the field of nutritional sciences. Was a major, internationally-
known faculty member. I thought that she had everything going
for her for a job like the provostship. That appealed to him
tremendously, of course, because it was a woman candidate that
was qualified. He thanked me profusely for that.

I really had nothing to do with the next one. The next one
turned out to be a chemical engineer [chuckles]. I was out of it

totally and never wanted to be involved.

 455

A Peaceful Recapture of a Building Where Students Were Protesting

Maslach: But before Bowker left, there was one incident which I think I
should relate to you, which gives a historical tone to the way
the chancellor s office was run by Bowker. He managed in such a
wonderful, low-key way, but totally in control. One day we had a
meeting at the University House. It was in the afternoon. There
had been a Mexican-American protest--students--a very low-key,
weak, statement out in Sproul Plaza, basically to increase
enrollment of Mexican-Americans on the Berkeley campus. There
was another couple of protest groups wandering around.

While we were at the chancellor s house in the afternoon

this was a cabinet meetingwe were notified by the chief of
police that Haviland Hall had been occupied. It was occupied by
a nasty activist group, I ll call it, who had co-opted a lot of
Mexican-American students who were at that protest, who were
students from other schools and colleges. They occupied Haviland
Hall.

We had kind of a coffee break. Mark Christensen and I

walked down to Haviland Hall, which is, as you know, just over
from University House, very close by. We went down there. There
was a lieutenant from the police force at the door. On his side
of the door--it was openwas one of the protestors. The
lieutenant and the protestor were just casually talking and
laughing. We came up, and the protestor, I don t think, knew
either one of us I said, "Could we come in?"
. I think Mark said
it, Mark Christensen, "Could we come in?" He says, "Sure, sir."

We went in and were wandering around the building. They

were all holed up--a small group they were all holed up in the
library. That s on the second floor. Beautiful library. I used
to study there when I was an engineering student. It used to be
the education library. We went in, just walked in.

"Oh-h-h-h-!" Everybody jumped. All the student activists

who were leaders of the movement, whatever movement it was at
that time. They just: "What are you doing here?!" They felt
that maybe the police had already taken over [chuckles], and we
were the vanguard upstairs. No, we were just walking around.

"Are the police here?"

"No." The "blue meanies" were who they thought were coming
in. No. So we just chatted a little while with the leaders of
this group. They gave us their demands, essentially. And so we
just walked out and went back up to University House.
 A56

Bowker had arranged for us to stay over for dinner. His

head of his household there, the woman who ran the operation, had
it catered by Narsai David, who was the big caterer at Berkeley
at that time. He came up with one of the finest gourmet meals I
ever had [chuckles]. I still remember. It was rack of lamb that
was perfectly done. So here we are up there, having our
discussion. Oh, a couple of people were for the old technique of
waiting until five in the morning and then taking over the
building by storm. Others, no, we ought to do it this time;
other people, a different time.

One of the turning points is you do it before the library

closes because in the library, a lot of people would come over.
Anyway, here s this discussion: what we should do.

I said, think that we ought to do it before ten o clock,

"I

when the library closes, but that s not the reason. The reason
is that we are supposed to have control of the campus, and ten
o clock is the closing time for buildings, period. That s it.
And therefore at ten o clock we should be in control."

The chief of police very properly took a very professional,

neutral tone. He was waiting for his orders. The discussion was
going back and forth. There were more people who were in for
doing something dramatic and storming the building, stuff like
thatbatons helmets. Bowker and I--he didn t say anything. He
,

just kept his own counsel right to the very end. Bowker and I
and somebody elsewe were essentially for going in quietly. He
announced that s what we were going to do.

I said, "Mark and I were just down there. Here s what the
situation is. There are about fifty people. They ve got all the
doors closed except one." And Lieutenant So-and-so was there,
talking with them. I said, just walked in."
"We I said,
"I

recommend that we"--talking to the chief of police--"go in, soft

hats, no batons, just no blue meanie stuff. Just go in, and
that s it."

He was all for it. The lieutenant actually had been

replaced. He was up there, too. He was nodding. So that s what
we did. Mark Christensen was in agreement on this, I remember.
And we kind of smiled because we had been down there and done
this ourselves. Sure enough, they had the police over here, out
of sight, and the lieutenant was talking with a single sentry on
the door. The police just came around, just swept right in, and
just took over the building. That was it. It was the most
peaceful building recapture in the history of any protest of any
university anywhere. It was done in five minutes. The people
 457

all left. We took cognizance of who they were, They all had to
identify themselves.

Damage of the Worst Intellectual Type Done by the Protestors

Maslach: The nasty part of the whole story, however, was about a month
later, I got a call from the librarian. The problem was that the
people who were in that library had methodically destroyed a
large number of books by just taking out, with a razor, a page in
the index or another page A5 or another page, and so on--so
isolated pages in hundreds of books had been sliced out. You
can t tell by looking at the book--it was done so neatly--that
that page was missing. They had to review all their books
eventually, to do that. But we spentr on the order of $300,000 to
replace the books in that library.

Swent : How wasteful.

Maslach: No one ever, ever heard that. It was never publicized or

anything, but everybody said, "Oh, they were so gentle, and they
were so nice. Wasn t it peaceful? And no damage." Yes, there
was damage, of the worst intellectual type, destruction of
intellectual knowledge. It was horrible. I wanted to get it
publicized, but I never was able to.

Swent: What happened to the pages they took out?

Maslach: Oh, they took them with them. I don t know.

Swent: Because otherwise they would have seen them in the wastebaskets .

Maslach: Right. But it was really one of the worst little destructive
things that I remember at that time.
 458

X VICE CHANCELLOR FOR RESEARCH AND ACADEMIC AFFAIRS, 1981 TO

1983

A Memo Regarding Research: Fine, but Ignored

Maslach: So I became vice chancellor, with Heyraan as chancellor. My title

was vice chancellor for research and academic services. It was a
constructed title. Never had that one before. I had always had

many ideas on the involvement of the chancellor s office in

increasing the environment and the situation for research on this
campus. I still think there are things that could be done and
have not been done. I wrote a memo that Heyman said was the
finest memo I ever wrote. It went to President Saxon. He never
took action on it. Then, when Saxon left to be chairman of the
corporation for MIT, one of his vice presidents wrote me a little
memo, thanking me for it. This was years later. But that memo
today is still relevant. It could be used by the university
system, which is really where the leadership should come--or
individual campuses would be given certain authorities in the
research area.

Swent : What was the gist of it? That was the gist of it?

Maslach: Yes. To be specif ic--for example, the federal research

establishment is run by advisory committees. The advisory
committees are overwhelmingly from East Coast, private
universities. We used to have a lot of clout under [President
John F.] Kennedy. As Kennedy pointed out to everybody, he had
more cabinet members from Berkeley than he had from Harvard.
Well, through that periodbut when [Richard M.] Nixon became
President, it was just a boycott on Berkeley and a lot of other
organizations. Major advisorsWhinnery, Townes, etc. --were just
cut off.

think I told you earlier that I got my letters of

I

appointment to the Naval Advisory Board from President Nixon,

which was really quite strange. But before that, I did not get
 459

it from any president; I got it from the Secretary of the Navy.

It was really something.

Swent : I thought that Nixon

Maslach: The science advisor was Lee Dubridge.

Swent : Yes, but I m recalling Nixon had stymied one appointment of

yours.

Maslach: Oh, yes. He wanted me toactually, the dirty work was done at
the vice presidential level, Spiro Agnew.

Swent : But your appointment was from Nixon?

Maslach: For the Navy Advisory Board, yes. It s really quite strange
[chuckles]. But I thought that the West Coast, which has more
than ten percent of the population now and has these major
universities the University of California, Stanford, Caltech,
USC--the amount of money is enormous. We were just out there in
the cow counties, essentially, as far as Washington, D.C., was
concerned. So I thought we ought to be turning up and offering
services in certain ways. That was never taken hold of.

Actually, Saxon was the wrong person for me to ask because

he was now head of the corporation of one of the major
organizations in Washington, D.C. I ve seen Dave. I saw him, I
should say, after he took that office. He used me back at MIT
quite a bit. I have known many presidents and corporation
executives of MIT.

Academic Services: Libraries and the Computer Center

Maslach: The academic services there were three areas that were prime. ]

was in charge of libraries. In other words, the librarian

reported to me, Joe

Swent: Rosenthal?

Maslach: Rosenthal. Then, somewhere along the line, the Computer Center
came under my direction. That s kind of a funny story. Bowker
and I both independently, separately were looking at the
Computer Center, which the hard-core part is down deep in the
second basement or third basement of Evans Hall. I was coming
down the steps, which are fairly narrow, considering it s such a
monstrous building. He was in the pit, they call it, the lowest
 460

floor. He was just going around the wall to come up the steps,
and we hit each other right at the steps, at the bottom of the
steps. After a few humorous remarks, I said, "What are you
doing?"

was actually coming down to pick up some computer program

I
I had down there. They had pickup times. I wanted to look at
it. If you want to get a re-run, why, late in the afternoon,
that s the time to put it in for the cheapest price, in the
evening. They could run it any time, two in the morning and so
on.

We started walking back up the steps, and he just looked at

me, and he said, "Why don t you just take over the Computer
Center?" That s Al at his best. He made up his mind. He knew
something had to be done, and he wanted me to do it. This
reflects upon something he once said. He said, "You know,
George, you have the talent for getting the best people to work
for you." What he meant was Rachael, April Roy, and others.

He would come down and have Rachael write letters for him.
He used to drive the staff in his office nuts because her letters
would just go straight through, and he would laugh and sign them,
whereas letters that he had other people in his office draft, he
would blue-pencil right and left.

In fact, one woman came down and talked to me at length.

"What am I doing wrong?"

said, "You re not doing anything wrong.

I You re just not
as good as she is, that s all. She s a pro." So Al and Rachael
used to have a lot of fun--talking and so on.

Mike Heyman and Giving Up Smoking

Maslach: Mike Heyman used to come down. He admired Rachael. He was

looking for someone and finally found a person to do what Rachael
did, which was kind of organize my office and get the flow of the
mail and so on and getting the work done and making sure it got
to the right place at the right time. So he would come down.
But he usually came down for another reason. He was quite a
smoker, chain smoker almost. He was trying to break the habit,
and so he was on some kind of a program and he would come down--
he could only smoke so many cigarettes or take so many cigarettes
from his home. In the middle of the morning, he would be down to
Rachael s office, bumming cigarettes.
 461

Swent: Oh!

Maslach: She would just have the lowest desk drawer, on the right-hand
side she would just open it and there was a carton of
cigarettes, of the kind that he smoked, which was Marlboro. It s
kind of sad. I m puddling up because when you get right down to
it, Rachel died of problems of emphysema and pneumonia.

Swent: Very sad.

Maslach: Yes. But the funniest part- -funny for me; I don t think Mike saw
it as humorous but when she found out that she had serious
problems with smoking, she quit cold turkey. She announced to me
she was quitting, and that s it. And she did. Now, that s awful
tough to quit smoking cold turkey when you ve been smoking forty
years, two packs a day.

Swent: That s heroic, isn t it?

Maslach: Amazing! I forgot what medical meeting she had, but something,
and she was told, give it up or--so she did it. A day or two
later, Mike Heyman comes down to bum a cigarette. She says, "I

don t have it. I broke the habit." He was amazed. I think he

was a little put out that somebody like Rachael was able to do
that and he wasn t. He went on for a while. But he broke it
eventually.

Swent: Now, you mentioned your pipe smoking, but you ve stopped that?

Maslach: Oh, I did that fifteen, twenty years before--f if teen years. I
was dean of engineering at that time when I gave it up.

Swent: Why?

Maslach: Well, I don t know. I just found I was coughing more. I think
the biggest single thing was not the coughing, because I didn t
inhale. Pipe smokers in general do not inhale. But I think the
worst thing was the loss of taste. I like food, and I like to
taste it, and I was just losing my taste buds. Now, years
"x"

later, I have the finest taste buds alive. No problem. So it

was the loss of taste, I think, that was the most important
thing. But I was not hooked on nicotine there because I didn t
inhale. Pipe smoking is much more of an outside imagery thing
than cigarette smoking. I ve got this picture that was taken of
me when I was provost. It s a profile, sitting and holding the
pipe, a perfect profile, a black background. I always thought it
was kind of an interesting picture. The pipe is dominant. I m
sort of staring into space.
 462

I realized, when I took over the computer center, what a

horror we had. We had two big old CDC, big frames, computers
that were outdated. One was for general use of the faculty and
the campus, and one was more for research. It was dominated by
the math department. The Computer Center director was a
mathematician. You have to remember, I was on the first
committee that set up the first Computer Center, Ed Teller being
the chairman of that committee. We set up this center in Cory
Hall in engineering, and it was later moved to Evans.

There was a big, basic void, when you get right down to it.
Bowker had surveyed the field with a committee that he appointed
from outside and found out that we were not even maybe in the top
thirty institutions with regard to computing instruction. We
just had to have a major overhaul of the Computer Center. That s
when I was given that job.

A Major Overhaul of the Computer Center with Stuart Lynn

Maslach: The director retired, resigned, a math professor. I had

immediately the job of getting an acting director. I used one of

the assistant directors there, who was the person who was in
charge of the flow-through of all of the work. He was not an
intellectual leader. He was not a faculty member. He
essentially was the man that made the operation run. I
instituted a search for a new director, nationwide. These were
pre-af f irmative action days, and so I got all these people
applyingsome from Livermore [Lawrence Livermore Laboratory] ,

which had an enormously good, large operation, and then a number

of others from universities throughout the United States.

I chose a man- -Stuart Lynn- -who was one of the few people
that in my time at this university 1 honestly consider to be a
genius. He was a Ph.D. out of the Los Angeles Numerical Analysis
Mathematics program when it was at its height. It was the best
in the world.

Swent: UCLA.

Maslach: UCLA, yes. He was an Oxford undergraduate. He was British

originally. He came to the United States, and he was at Rice
University when we appointed him. He really was what we needed,
I interviewed him. He was a younger manvery dynamic and very
British. He and I struck off very well. As part of his ethnic
background, he was Polish [laughter].
 463

We laughed at that. An English mother and Polish father-

wartime marriage. I appointed him. I got the appointment
through, I should say. Actually, Bowker has the final authority
on the appointment and it goes to the Regents and everything
else. But he came in, and he took over like you never saw
anybody take over. There was a year in which I was essentially
the person in charge, with the man running the daily operations.
I knew all kinds of things that needed to be done, especially in
the hardware business. We had to get away from this dinosaur
operation into something modern.

I made all kinds of monies available, including that

equipment money I was talking about earlier. We were getting

money from all kinds of areas, moving into that computer
function. The legislative analyst and his top henchmen up there
in Sacramento knew I was doing it. They accused me--laughingly--
of running the biggest laundromat in the state, laundering money.
In other words, the secret is to have some outside accounts in
other words, money that doesn t come under the budget or under
the feds or something like that. And then, of course, it s nice
to have some fed accounts so you can move money back and forth.
The Mafia knows all about this.

I would do this. For that year, I think I maneuvered close

to $3 million into the equipment budget. It was so wonderful.

I remember Dave Sachrison, who was chair of electrical

engineering/computer sciencehe called and said, "Look, I ve got

a $75,000 grant from the NSF"--National Science Foundation. "I

have to have matching funds."

I said, "You ve got it."

He said, "Listen, I spent all night writing this up." He

read his presentation [chuckles] over the phone. I was in a good
joking relationship with Dave. Eventually he says,"DoI have
the money?"

I said, "You certainly do. In fact, why don t you write

them back and see if you can get another $75,000 for another
equipment, and I ll find the money." He laughed, but we got this
very new, very fancy piece of small equipment.

I had done a lot of work in the year without--

**

Maslach: So we decided on various things to do for the future of the

Computer Center and the future of computing. I had already
 464

received from Mark Christensen the authority to have engineering

be the group that taught computing on this campus, for the great
unwashed undergraduate population. We just started going full
blast. I mean, Stu Lynn is one of those kind of guys that works

twenty-four hours a day, literally. He sleeps only about four

hours, and he s moving all the time and thinking all the time.

Why I said he was a genius was that he just did not know the
computer technical stuff. He knew about financing. He knew
about the growth of the computer industry. He knew about the use
of the computer as it would become, as it is today. He didn t
predict Internet or something like that, but he predicted all
kinds of social uses that were just absolutely amazing. I just
gave him free rein.

The Academic Personnel Office

Maslach: Finally, of course, I had the operations of the academic

personnel office and kind of overviewing the process of
appointments, promotions, etc., which I had been doing as
provost. It was kind of interesting to try to increase research
activities on this campus. I was able to do a number of things,
but nothing stupendous. It was only a short period of two years.
I tried to clean up things during those two years. I knew I was

going to retire, and I just did not want to start new, big
programs.

Those last two years the first one was very active, but the
second one kind of went downhill as far as activities. I

actually retired in March. What you do is you make a computation

on your retirement benefits and so on, and you can retire
essentially so many days before that and still maintain your
maximum benefits. So I retired with thirty-four years in the
system.

I spent a lot of time that last year, again, doing inputs to

the Academic Personnel Manual. That last year, systemwide, they
incorporated my work and put out a new Personnel Manual. They
didn t dedicate it to me, but [chuckles] I was a key person on
many of the changes in that one particular area; namely, faculty
appointments and promotions.

I spent a lot of time that last six months, I guess I should

say, just going around, talking to people and trying to leave

some ideas not grooming people, but if I were to say, "This is
 465

what I would do," and so on. Tien, of course, was appointed as

vice chancellor, and I talked with him at length.

Al Bowker, Creative Administrator

Maslach: Bowker, as I said, is a seven-, eight-man person sort of

administrator. He was the eighth man, really. He had a method
of administrating that, as I ve always said--low key. He has a
technique that I have used and other people I know have used it.
It works very well. He spoke in a very low voice. You had to
listen, move your chair closer to hear him. It works. It s a
technique that a lot of people use.

Mike Heyman was just entirely the opposite. He s Mike,

that s all. I mean, he s big, he s an athlete, he s energetic.
This is the way he does it--conf rontational technique, much more
than Al Bowker s technique. But when you really get down to it,
and I ve said this publicly to people throughout the world,
especially in the United States, I kept up with administration of
higher education. I would put Al Bowker up with anybody, his
career and what he has done, the way he did it.

And second, he knew everything about higher education. He

kept in touch. In the fall, he would go back East and talk with
people in Washington, New York, and so on. And he would go over
to Europe and over to England, which he loves to do. He would
touch base with higher education everywhere. He knew always whom
to see or whom to visit for a given problem. It was amazing, his
memory of these things.

As he told me when we first brought him here, don t have

"I

any special talents in this regard, but I have experience. I can

tell you what will work or what won t work." I looked at him at
that time. He had creative ideas. Take that computer business.
He went out and surveyed it to make sure we could do something in
the field and then said, "Let s do it." So he did have big
impact in the curriculum on a variety of areas. We have not had
that kind of impact since Al Bowker s day. I think we ve become
more ossified. The impacts are now coming not from the top level
but from the bottom levels, the new assistant professors and
changing the curriculum and changing researchworking upward-
bottom up, rather than top down. Which is good.

Swent: That s interesting.

Maslach: Yes.
 466

Swent : Of course he was here at a very crucial time, also.

Maslach: Oh, yes. The main thing that 1 always remember, just to show you
how dramatic it was: he would point out he had done the research.
He said, to this point, we have enough people applying as
"Up

freshman who are qualified, who come, and we are in steady state.
It s exactly steady state for the last seven years." Well,
immediately thereafter, [after] making this statement, he noticed
that we were going up a steep incline here. Today we re turning
away qualified people by the tens of thousands! Statewide,
40,000 people qualified were turned away. We need that new
campus, and we need it now. But Al was the one that could see
that problem. He saw it long before anybody else, and he worked
on it .

This is the kind of leadership I enjoyed. Out of the blue,

you get a lecture on freshman admissions. Gee, isn t that
wonderful that someone is watching that? And he was.

He got on top of the budget. We used to send money back to

Sacramento every year because if we don t use the money, don t
appoint people and they don t come or something, so the monies,
millions, go back. We got to transfer that money. Some of that
money I used in computing and so on. When Bowker came, from then
on, the amount of money that we sent back to Sacramento was close
to zero. Look how he operated on the budgetmuch, much more
creatively than before. His impact was enormous.

Swent: And he s still here.

Maslach: He s still here. The one thing that bothers me--and this I have
known from MIT days and others the University of California
systemwide and campuswide do a lousy job of using the talent of
people such as Bowker. I know, I m sure, that Robert Berdahl
does call Bowker, but at MIT they gave their former presidents
office space, secretarial help, and so on. They have a wing, and
over there, all former, retired presidents are there, with space
and talentpeople, not just secretaries and computers and so on.
It s not a mail drop. They come in, and what the corporation
does is ask them to do long-term thinking work, nothing to do
with operations. Stay out of operations. You re not in charge
any more. But they re picking their brains on long-term work.

Now, I knew these presidents, three of them, personally,

well. The University of Calif ornia the chancellor leaves, and
he s lost. Al s got a little office up there at Evans Hall.
That s it. I m sure he is used to some degree, but I m saying
the way to use him--MIT makes us look stupid, really.
 467

Activities in Retirement: Sailing, Travel, Consulting

Swent: What have you done in your retirement? Have you been used?

Maslach: I ve been used to some degree, more by federal committees, and

university overhead relations committee used me heavily for a
while.

Swent: Overhead relations?

Maslach: Well, the amount of money we get in overhead from the federal
government for all our sponsored projects is fixed by a formula.
The way we use the formulafor example, Stanford, Princeton, and
so on get about 100 percent overhead, and we get today about 52
percent. We were getting, for many years, 27 percent. Something
was wrong. We have changed things, but I m the dinosaur because
I signed the first overhead agreement with University of
California with the Office of Naval Research, back in 1950, when
I was head of that project. And I was chosen because it was the
largest ONR project. My name is in the file somewhere in
Washington [chuckles].

But then I got to working with the French government on the

development of commercial products industry research
,

development, the next step. Basically, what I lectured on and

worked on for many years is the use of the university faculty ,

researchand how you make that transfer. For example, my best

example is the chip. Right here at Berkeley, in the early days,
much of the research was done not at Stanford, but at Berkeley.

Swent: The computer chip.

Maslach: The computer chip. That industry employs 400,000 people in the
state of California. France would love to have an industry
something like that. But it has been a failure for a variety of
reasons. But also the Austrian government asked me to work the
same way, on development of new products. I kept up my contacts
with Saudi Arabia and the development of new universities. Tried
to get them to start community colleges, which they are doing
maybe now, but it s iffy.

I ve kept my input, but I really had a much larger life

outside of the university, which is the first year after
retirement we designed, with Joe Esherick as the architect, [a
home at] Sea Ranch. Next year we had it built, and we ve been
using it constantly ever since. This was a house in cooperation
with Christina, our daughter, and her husband, Phil [Zimbardo] .

We are partners in that operation.

 468

We do a lot of traveling. I did a lot--

Swent: You ve led Bear Treks [alumni tour groups].

Maslach: Once. No, we do traveling. For example, two days from now I m
over to Hawaii with Doris and one of our children and two of our
grandchildren. That will be kind of a fun week. Then we go down
to San Diego. Some of Doris s relatives, San Diego Yacht Club,
former commodore. Then we ve got time in Ixtapa, which we ll be
doing--snorkeling. And then we ve got three weeks that we re
going to be over in Italy. We travel a good deal.

Doris is still heavily enmeshed with rent control, League of

Women Voters, etc. She is more tied up than I am [chuckles].

Swent : Who was your Sea Ranch architect?

Maslach: Esherick, Homsey, Dodge & Davis. When they won all those awards,
there was a picture of our house as one of the things they had
done .

Swent: That has been very gratifying, I m sure.

Maslach: Oh, yes.

I sail a lot.

Swent: You still sail?

Maslach: Oh, yes. During the good weather, I m out there every week. In
fact, this next month, in three or four weeks, I ll be getting
the boat out, paint the bottom, and stuff like that.

Swent: You had to give up your sailing for a while there, didn t you?

Maslach: No. Even with my knee operation--

Swent : But earlier, in your career, didn t you--

Maslach: I gave up racing. I sail on the Bay by myself a lot, and I

cruise to different places. It s very nice to just sail away by
yourself somewhere and drop an anchor, fix a drink, watch the sun
set, fix your supper, and enjoy yourself.

Swent: What kind of boat do you have?

Maslach: It s a thirty-footer. To people that know racing, it s a half-

tonner. It s under the international ocean cruising rule. It s
a rule that the stern comes almost to a point. It becomes pretty
 469

narrow in the stern. The latest ruling which is used for more
ocean racing boats comes with a broad stern, a wide stern.
There s a big difference in the two racing rules. This one is an
Arpege-class name. It was built in France. It was the hot boat
for a number of years back around 1970 to 75, 80. Dufour was
the naval architect. It s a very comfortable boat. Sleeps six.
You can sail--if you put in extra tanks and they do sail it to
Honolulu, stuff like that.

Swent: Does your family enjoy this with you?

Maslach: Oh, yes. In fact, I just sent a bunch of enlargements to Steve

up in Seattle. They re the ones we re going to see over in
Hawaii. Pictures of him and his wife and the two kids, sailing
the boat. When they came down and visited us months ago, I took
the son, Dillon, out to the hallway, where I have pictures
mounted. I pointed up a picture I had^ taken in Eagle Harbor in

Bainbridge Island, where they live. The picture is essentially a

bunch of small boats tied up to a float, and their sails are half
up, half down. It s a very photogenic picture, which I took with
a photo lens, long distance. He started stammering. He pointed
at one of the boats and said, sailed that boat yesterday."
"I

[chuckles] He was in a class learning how to sail up there in

Bainbridge Island, and that boat, one of about five in the
picture, was one he had sailed the day before. He was laughing.
It was funny. He was surprised.

We go out to the yacht club quite often. A lot of people

out there. You see a lot of people, a lot of retired people, of
course. People on either side of me are both retired. One is
Irish; one is Scottish. One is MacAfee and the other is MacFay
[laughs]. They re all a lot of fun.

Swent : And you ve had knee surgery, I understand you were an ideal
patient for that.

Maslach: I always am an ideal patient. Every doctor I ve ever had has

said that about me because I work at it. They tell me to do
something, I do it. And I overdo it, if necessary. Now, for
example, I m walking miles every day. People just stare at me,
Can t believe it.

Swent: You re in marvelous condition, obviously.

Maslach: Yes. I don t have a knee problem anymore. That s solved. What
I do is I have a floating vertebra in my back, L-4, lower back,
lumbar four. Floats. And it hits the spinal cord, of course,
and therefore I have cramps. L-4 controls essentially, at that
area, controls cramping in the calf muscles, so I walk stiffly
 470

until I limber up. But, oh, by nine o clock I m in good shape.

But then come nine o clock at night sitting is not good. Lying
flat on your back is the best. One unit pressure on the
vertebrae. Standing straight is two units. Sitting is four
units, which surprised everybody, but they did the research. And
bending over and doing work is eight units, so you want to avoid
that.

I got a lot of good ideas from Dr. Elizabeth Kelly, now with
the back clinic at Kaiser. You just have to learn how to live
with that back. She said, while she waggled her finger at me
like a school marm, she said, s up to you.
"It You are in
control." So I m in control.

Swent : You know, we ve got a few minutes --what about Kaiser? How do you
feel about them?

Maslach: If they want to make an advertisement for Kaiser medical, I ll be

happy to do it.

Swent: You ve seen it through many years.

Maslach: Totally positive. The only negative that you can get out of me
is that you have to work the bureaucracy. Just like I laundered
money here at the University of California, you have to know how
to work their system.

Swent: You re saying that--

Maslach: You just can t sit back and expect them to do it. They re a
health maintenance organization, and you have to use them. The
way to use them is to actually talk directly with your principal
physician--in my case, Dr. Ned Durkin--and you just tell him
what s wrong, what s happening, and what you want done. Once
they talk with you, the way they would talk to me, why, they know
that I am serious about this, so they move ahead. I will tell
you right now that the doctors that I ve been seeing over the
years, every one has been tops. I cannot complain of the medical
work.

To get them, though, you have to go to your primary

physician. You have to get referred. The bureaucracy on the
counter, to get an appointment or on the phone, is essentially
the biggest single problem with Kaiser. They ve got a phone
system which is totally insensitive.

Swent: It s overwhelmed, also.

 471

Meslach: And it s also overwhelmed. It s totally insensitive to the

individual. They do review their doctors (I almost said faculty)
constantly. The half-a-dozen doctors that I have seen in the
last several years, they have sent me a form which I have filled
out. It has always been positive, with a few suggestions for
improvement. But I really don t have any complaints. And the
cost, which is zero at this point, for me--you can t beat it.
No, I use it. You have to use it.

It s just like the Academic Senate here at the University of

California. If you really want the Senate to do something,
you ve got to use it. You ve got to go to them. You ve got to
explain it to them. You ve got to give them a job. You ve got
to say, "Look, this is your jurisdiction. You advise me." They
do it. They love to do it. But if you just sit in your office
and do nothing, forget it. You ve got to make it a dynamic
operation. That s the whole point.

Well, you ve got to get to your faculty--

Swent : Yes. I was going to ask you our customary ending question: in

retrospect, how do you feel about it all, but I think we ve

pretty well--

Maslach: Let me tell a small joke there. There was a man by the name of
Richard Powell, who was prominent in chemistry, [a] professor.
He was kind of a joker. He would play hearts and sit around
there. He says, "One of the things we ought to do at this
university is to appoint a committee upon the retirement of a
faculty member to determine whether we should have appointed him
or not."

Swent : In the first place! [chuckles]

Maslach: Everybody laughed, of course. It was a big joke. But I often

would think back about that. I thought to myself, You know, that
was a joke, but in many respects, it had a lot of meaning.

But to the individual, me, I should be reviewing what I have

done. And as I review my total careerevery ten years,
changing--! was a professional engineer, I did research in
engineering, and then I went into engineering teaching, and then
engineering administration, and then higher education
administration. That s my career. I think back upon it, and
there was nothing I predicted. I never expected it to go that

high. I never asked for a job in my life. People always asked

rae to work and do things. Just like the first professor,
Boelter, telling me, "You ought to go to MIT." So I did. I was
asked to be provost. I ve always been sort of the good soldier
 472

in these things, doing what people asked me to do, but always

with an eye to new challenges, new events.

I am an engineer--! m a problem solver. That s what I am.

When Bowker says, "Why don t you take over computing?" How far
do I jump, and in what direction? I know now what to do, and so
I do it.

Swent : Good at analyzing.

Maslach: Yes. I had my engineering techniques of looking at a problem,

how do it, and so on.
I As Heyns first and Bowker said you get
the best people to work for you. I mean, Stu Lynn--there was not
a better computer center director in the United States, period.
He s now at Cornell and doing fine work there. He works big
internationally. But that s it. He was good. There was no
question about it.

Okay? You better get going.

Swent: All right.

 473

XI EPILOGUE

On Problem-Solving

[Interview 11: November 10, 1999]

Swent : When we stopped several months ago, you were just characterizing
yourself as a problem solver, and today we re going to follow up
on that subject.

Maslach: Those last words are sort of an opening into what I will call an
epilogue .

I don t know when it started, probably when I was about nine

years old, and first walked into the main library in San
Francisco. Of course the first thing you see in that top big
room of that building, which is soon to become the Asian Museum,
is this enormous file catalog, just fifty feet long with all
these individual drawers, each drawer containing hundreds of
cards, and each card representing a book.

Swent: This is what you saw, but you don t see it now.

Maslach: You don t see card catalogs any more [chuckles], but I must admit
I just looked at that thing and I started probably at and"A"

just began to explore what this was. This was my first contact
with a--quote--body of knowledge- -unquote. Well, as time went by
I just explored through that catalog on subject matters and
materials that I didn t know anything about and I would go and
get the books. There was a librarian there who recognized me and
she would be the one I would give my call card to and get the
book from her.

This went on for many years, and I just developed my basic

strength of reading. I still read books constantly. In fact,
when we finish here, I will go past the Morrison [Reading Room of
the] Library and drop in and get a couple of more books. But
 A7A

this all goes on to the next step, which is of course years

later, when I was at the University of California, and coining in
as a dean. The big job that Ed Strong gave me--one of threewas
to make the engineering curriculum a true curriculum of 120
semester units. Okay: here s a body of knowledge: this is what
we want to teach our students; what should it contain? And so we
are constructing this body of knowledge to be covered in four
years. There are all sorts of constraints in terms of having
mathematics, physics, chemistry; having a common lower division
so we articulate with the community colleges and the state
colleges; but then what do we contribute? You know, here is the
main thing.

The Rise and Fall of Academic Disciplines Necessitates

Reorganization

Maslach: And so this was ray first brush with dealing with a body of
knowledge and working on it and adding things, deleting things,
and noticing the rise and fall of various disciplines. And to me
this was a wonderful introduction. Fortunately I had a very able
chairman of the committee, that did the revision of the
curriculum, and I talked about this earlier in the oral history.
John Weyhausen was the professor who handled this.

But at this point I became directly and specifically

interested in problems which were curricular problems. I kind of

thought that this was my weak area as far as being a dean, and so
I put more effort into it. Unfortunately my first brush with the
curriculum was to wipe out the College of Mining. We were at a
desperate situation; we had about four students, and six
professors. The need for mining had long since disappeared in
the state of California, and we just did not have the students.
There are very few schools of mines today; the big ones I can
think of are in Colorado and South Dakota. But when I put my
name to that paper, wiping out that college, I must say that I
probably didn t know what I was doing exactly, and I heard about
it from a lot of miners, but it was something we just had to do.

Don McLaughlin for many years would chide me about my wiping

out college of mining, because he was the last dean of that
"his"

college .

It might come as a great surprise to people reading this,

electrical engineering was a branch of the department of
mechanical engineering. It was not a separate department of its
own when I went to the university in the late thirties, early
 475

forties. Only the developments during the war truly developed

electronics and the new electrical engineering. In the thirties
and forties, electrical engineering was overwhelmingly power
development and power distribution. It was the PG&E [Pacific Gas
& Electric] type of concepts that were being studied and taught.
There were only one or two people who were playing around with
electronics, one being Larry Marshall, who talked me into going
to the Rad Lab at MIT. Of course, today electrical engineering
and computer sciences, a department in engineering, is also one
of the largest departments on the campus. For many years, it was
the largest department. Now there is one down in the biosciences
that is larger in number.

So 1 was looking at all these changes that were going on.

[chuckles] For example, in the curricular changes: the course I
taught one time, graphics, was wiped out. We don t teach
graphics any more; it can all be done on a small computer with a
small program. So I am trying to give you a picture of all these
waves of change that go on, and of course you have faculty who
are growing older and want to hang on to their particular
discipline, and their disciplines are becoming less and less
important. Many faculty would come to me and say, I want you to
appoint a man who is doing exactly what I am doing. Well, that
never happens. You have to use new appointments for new
programs.

After seeing the College of Mines wiped out, it was quite a

long time before we later saw other changes of this magnitude.
For example, just this last year or so, Naval Architecture is no
more. It was a three-man department, excellent in the field, but
it disappeared for an entirely different reason: namely, a legal
decision made by the government of the United States not to
participate in a maritime economy. We no longer build ships;
they are built in Japan or in Europe. And the need for naval
architecture and this discipline has vanished.

So you wonder what is going to happen in all these things.

I tried my darnedest to energize these small departments by
introducing the concept of double undergraduate majors that
allowed these departments to teach undergraduate courses.
Usually small departments with very few students teach nothing
but graduate work. So materials engineering and mineral
technology, for example, which is really an offshoot of mining,
was able to contribute in the college undergraduate program.

The reason I am making this epilogue is just the other day I

received the minutes of the College of Engineering and I read all
of the reports and so on and what you see today is a very large
number of students at the undergraduate level who are enrolled in
 476

"engineering Well, there is no department of

science".

engineering science, but there is a curriculum. And I could just

see the handwriting on the wall. Small departments, such as
nuclear engineering and maybe mineral technology and materials
sciences, which are all engineering sciences in their own right,
probably will be amalgamated at some late date into this new
program, because each one of them can teach undergraduate courses
as well as have their own graduate activity.

So this was the big problem that 1 was asked to solve and I
worked with it all my life since becoming a dean. And it is not
just endemic to engineering. These changes are going on
everywhere within the university. For example, one of the first
things I received when I walked into the provost position, was
the report by the School of Forestry and the College of
Agricultural Sciences to amalgamate. Here is another
reorganization, and why? And I had to sit down with all these
faculty members--small groups, large groups, and so on--to find
out something about a field I knew nothing about.

So all these changes are constantly going on within the

university. I walked here this morning past the South Hall, and
I looked up there. That used to be the School of Librarianship;
then it went to Library Science, and now it is Library
Information Science, something like that. You cannot know what
is going to happen next. The entire biosciences area was
reorganized in the last several years, something that Rod Park
and I started many years ago. That entire area has been
reorganized, and I am talking hundreds of faculty in this
situation.

It was sort of these problems that you know I handled and

worked on and I think probably it is one of the areas where I did
some of the most good. I should say the best work that I did was

mainly in the reorganization function. (I just read something in

the paper about people using words such as "most good".)
[laughter)

Swent: Environmental science that is a whole new area.

Maslach: That is a whole new name, but reorganization into a college was
important there. But within each of the departments, they are
pretty much the way they were: city and regional planning,
landscape architecture, and architecture. I was over there at a
fund raising dinner type thing the other night when you saw me at
the Faculty Club.
 477

The Importance of the "Hold" Box

Maslach: But I found out very quickly that you could not move too fast on
these matters. All sorts of things happen. One of the things I
learned very quickly is that if you did not have to make a
change, then it s best not to make any change, to just sit back
and wait. I used to have a box on my desk in which I "hold"

would toss memos, letters, and what have you that I couldn t
decide what to do. So rather than precipitously starting
something, I would just wait, and it s amazing how often people
would solve the problem for me. Time has a way of bringing the
real issues up to the top and you would be talking about whole
different things and the report that you were looking at and
reading did not describe what the fundamental problems were. So
I had this reputation of putting things in the hold box and so 1
would tell people when they called me, "Well, that s an item I ll
put into my hold box."

"How long are you going to hold it?"

said, "Until 1 have an idea, because I don t know what to

I

do. simply don t know what to do, and I won t do anything

I

unless I know what to do." So people were very sympathetic with

that kind of approach.

Swent : It sounds like an excellent management technique.

Maslach: Well, I developed a lot of these. 1 would always chide

[Chancellor] Tien, you know, the clean desk that he maintains and
he has admitted that this was an administrative technique that I
passed on to him.

Swent: The "clean desk"

technique.

Maslach: That refers to one time that I told him, don t ever read a memo
twice. Take action one way or another, or put it in a hold box,
but basically, take action, and by that I mean, ask somebody to
do research on this, or ask somebody to do something, find out
more facts, and so on. Do something; don t just toss it back in
the box and wait and shuffle the paper around the next day.

It Was a Great Ride"

Maslach: Well, to kind of categorize the whole episode of my oral history,

I saw a quotation, a man by the name of Chuck Yeager, who was the
 478

famous test pilot, first man to break the sound barrier. And
when I look back at my career, 1 just come up with the same
position that he had: was a great ride."
"It
[laughter]

In many respects the ending of this oral history was stated

by the man at the desk of The Bancroft Library reading room just
an hour ago. Remember when I came in he asked for my name and I
replied, "Professor Maslach." I thought his response was

perfect. He said, "Oh, yes, psychology." So now I have proved

my three-stage theory of life where I am now known as the father
of Christina, and soon the father of Jamie and the father of
Steve.

Transcribed by Mim Eisenberg

Final Typed by Robert Dirig
 479

TAPE GUIDE--George J. Maslach

Interview 1: August 20, 1998

Tape 1, Side A
Tape 1, Side B
Tape 2, Side A
 480

Interview 7: February 4, 1999

Tape 18, Side A 270
Tape 18, Side B 281
Tape 19, Side A 291
Tape 19, Side B 300
Tape 20, Side A 310
Tape 20, Side B 320

Interview 8: February 18, 1999

Tape 21, Side A 324
Tape 21, Side B 335
Tape 22, Side A 344
Tape 22, Side B 354
Tape 23, Side A 363
Tape 23, Side B not recorded

Interview 9: March 4, 1999

Tape 2A, Side A 373
Tape 24, Side B 383
Tape 25, Side A 393
Tape 25, Side B 402
Tape 26, Side A 412
Tape 26, Side B 421

Interview 10: March 18, 1999

Tape 27, Side A 423
Tape 27, Side B 432
Tape 28, Side A 442
Tape 28, Side B 452
Tape 29, Side A 463
Tape 29, Side B not recorded

Interview 11: November 10, 1999

Tape 1, Side A 473
Tape 1, Side B not recorded
APPENDIX

Maslach family tree 481

College of Engineering, Degrees Earned, 1939-1990 483

Doctoral Degrees Awarded in the College of Engineering, 1943-44

to 1975-76 485

Herb Caen, San Francisco Chronicle. April 23, 1971 486

Photo and headline from "Campus Report," June- July 1972 487

"Jet-Age Professors," from Look magazine, February 23, 1965 488

United States Naval Academy Academic Advisory Board, 1974-75 493

Delegation from the College of Engineering of the University

of California, Berkeley, to the People s Republic of China, 1979 499

of the UC Berkeley Engineering Alumni

"History Society," from
Matrix, December 1978 501
 FAMILY OF ANNA MASLACB

Mother Albina Zakrzewska married Franciszek Psczolkowski

Father died in 1905, he was 47 years old, Anna was 12 years old
Mother Remarried to T.Cesarz
Mother died at age 84
CHILDREN

LUCY died in 1906, 20 years old, pneumonia, Poland

PEGGY died in 1985,. 9^ years old f U.S.A.

ANNA died in 1974, 81 years old, U.S.A.

JENNY died in 1986, 91 years old, U.S.A.

SOPHIE died in 1979, 71 years old, Poland

SON died childbirth, Poland
SON died childbirth, Poland
ROSE died 2 years old, Poland
TADEUSZ CESARZ died in 1986 Poland

Anna Maslach was born May 8, 1893 town of Sosnowiec, Poland. Came

to San Francisco, California in 1912 with her sister Jenny. Their

uncle Frank Zakrzewski a barber, who had a barber shop on the olo
Chronicle Building in San Francisco paid for both airls

transportation from Poland. Found them a room in a house on Post

and Franklin Street. He found them each a job in the alteration

department at the White Bouse. Both girls spoke Polish ana

Russian. Bead of the department was Russian.

Anna and Michael had 4 children. Sophie 1914, Michael 1916,

Stanley 1918, (died during flu epidemic, 1 week old) and George
1920.
 FAMILY OF MICHAEL M. MASLACH

Mother Marianna Golec married John Maslach

Father died in 1896, Michael M. Maslach was 12 years old
Mother died in 1931, Michael M. Maslach was 47 years old

CHILDREN

THOMAS died in 1965, 84 years old, Poland

ROZALIA Poland

FRANCIS died in 195%, 70 years old, U.S.A.

MICHAEL died in 195%, 72 years old, U.S.A.

KAROLINA died in 1969, U.S.A.

ALBERT died in 1942, 48 years old, U.S.A.

JOSEPH / ;r . ,
.
i Poland
FRANZ died at birth, Poland
CHRISTIAN died at birth, Poland

Michael M. Maslach was born September 23, 1884 in Rzeszow on a farm

southern tip of Poland. When he was 20, he worked on a boat landed

in New York 1904. tie worked in Oil City Pennsylvania, Chicago,
worked at the Eureka Lumber Mill in California 1907. Came to San
Francisco in 1912, worked for the Southern Pacific Railroad. In

1913 he met Anna Pszczolkowska and married in November 13, 1913.

Worked for the Leighton Cafeterias Chain, went to work for the

Federal Government as Maintenance engineer for the Post Office and

the Federal Building. Retired age 70 Active as President in 3

Lodges .
COLLEGE OF ENGINEERING 483 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY

DEGREES EARNED

1939-40
COLLEGE OF ENGINEERING UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY
484

DEGREES EARNED

1980-81
 485

O)

O)

Ul

O T
o
tf>

w r

S-
(A

I
cr
<D

Q
15

-
o
O
O
 486

Fri., Apr. 23, 1971 23

HERBA CAEN
IT
krh

How Gritty the Nitty

M
ADD 1 N S I D E S: Why did the Regents
search committee pick Albert Bowker, chancellor
of the huge City University of New York (CUNY)
to be the new chancellor at UC-Berkeley? Well, for
one thing, UC last year dropped to 63rd in the
nation in faculty salaries while CUNY grabbed
six spots in the top ten. Chuckles George Maslach,
Dean of Engineering at Cal and a member of the
search committee: "Don t think we didn t know
what MC were doing!"
 I

j,

.- -1
JUNE-JULY 1972

Park, left, and Maslach: a reshuffling brought them to the top

Wearing an old campus title, Park

and Maslach step into new jobs
 488

i"

X?*?

.&*

ifot

16 .;- 2:1^6
 Look

February 23 ,

1965
..y*-

A gathering conflict
disrupts the dream life of
America s new elite

fit*

r& JET- AGE Heliport is frequent meeting place for Col faculty.

:fe& PROFESSORS
AFTER A CENTURY of ridicule and neglect, the other down. During summers and sabbaticals, he

American university professor has come upon jets with his wife and three children
to Europe,

sweet time*. Everyone wants the benefit of his where he serves on a NATO advisory board. What
ever can be gained from the academic
brain government, industry, foundations and. of life among
course, universities. Their blandishments are elite, George Maslach is getting.

glittery :
expensive tools, extensive time, intensive But are students getting what they should
travel and excellent pay. Yesterday s tower-bound from professors like George Maslach? The ques
HP id professor often moonlighted to make ends meet.
The jet-age professor, if he s good, can write his
tion dominates academic debate today. Critical
educators charge that many professors find re
own ticket. One who is and does is pictured here. search grants and consulting fees so seductive

George Maslach, dean of Berkeley s College they have all but abandoned teaching. If it s not

of Engineering, is a professor of aeronautical en the professor, it s his university, which, mindful

gineering. A colleague calls him "the

outstanding of its reputation, demands that he "publish or

in the world" in his field, rarefied- Either way, the argument holds, the stu
experimentalist perish."

gas dynamics. Twice recently, Maslach has turned dent loses out. Teaching is frequently shunted to

down "$50,000 kind of things" from industry be assistantsand graduate students. Many under
cause life as he now lives it is too exciting. It s graduates have only passing contact with the best
three minutes from his office, where he faculty minds. Students are all but forgotten, sayi
campus
supervises the education of an inordinate number a recent Carnegie Foundation report, in the "head

of the nation s better engineering students, to his long search for more and better grants, fatter feet,
contemporary home in the hills above, where, from higher salaries, higher rank." And because Cal i
his balcony, the entire Bay Area spreads before faculty is rated among the top four nationally, the

him. During the school year, he averages at least Berkeley campus is invariably cited as the villain
one trip a month East as a consultant, and turns an- ous prototype of a "university on the make."
Such abuses dismay Maslach and George
IN BERKELEY HOME, Mailach explains why Pimentel, the restless, committed chemiitry profo-
he turned down two glittery offers *or pictured on the next page. At Berkeley, it is

from industry. **77ie living s too good here." matter of policy that even the most venerated
continued

AT WASHINGTON CONFERENCE, Maslach shares a light break in heavy proceedings.

 490

CAMPUS REVOLT

wo/ between
research and
teaching. It is between
mediocrity and excellence.
fimerttel, 42 and fait, joint students in research-group challenge motet.
Final icore: Macromolecules, 16, Infrared Spectroscopy, 14.

faculty stars teach undergraduate courses in addi Berkeley,lest they be lost in the bigness. Pimentel confront at once: What is a university fe
tion to graduate seminars. It is a matter of honor organized a freshman science honors program de should study there? The vision of men 1
that professors not let outside work interfere with signed to stimulate talented minds through close lach and Pimentel is as new as the futur
their teaching, and not accept work that doesn t faculty-student contact. as medieval Oxford. A university is, at

enhance it. Neither honor nor policy is violated In one vital respect, however, both professors for scholarship, and for students with the )

nearly so often as charged. Maslach and Pimentel find the current criticism specious. To them, there to be scholars. Says Pimentel: "The prin
agree, but each would like to see such violators is no choice between research and teaching. The ligation of the university is to make lu
as do exist sent packing. only choice is between mediocrity and excellence. is a place for the very best student. If v
Both men make conscious efforts to work with There are few good teachers who don t do re do it,nobody else will."

undergraduates. Says Maslach: any student

"If search, they contend ; most research translates into The average student ? This year. Mail
thinks enough of me to ask me to advise him, I, by good teaching. Maslach: "Research and teaching diets, Berkeley will suggest to its 20,000 a)
God. amgoing to respond, even if it takes hours." are synonymous words. If you don t do research, that many of them might learn more end
Pimentel never locks his office door. His students you re going to be a trade school." Pimentel: "Re
pier at one of California s many good f<

revere him. Says one: him, you re a col

"With search and teaching are like sin and confession. If colleges. Given the demands of the jet age
league rather than an underling." The author of a you don t do any of the former, you don t have solution may be unavoidable. "We want a {

popular high-school chemistry textbook, Pimentel anything to talk about in the latter." percentage of our population to be goin
learned a few years ago that high-school teachers Beneath the heat are questions that American says George Pimentel, "but \
university,"

were counseling their better students to avoid universities, already splitting at the seams, must want the caliber of their education to decli

PROF. GEORGE PIMENTi

a member of Berkeley t taper
chrmistri faculty, it invettigi

atmosphere of Mars. "Rcsear

is the reason I m at the unite r

he says. "I lone to teach,

but I wouldn t be here if I

couldn t do research."

PRODUCED BY
LEONARD GROSS
PHOTOGRAPHED BY
JAMES HANSEN
 AC1

CAMPUS REVOLT contlnuto

They knew a name, a face, a grade. But to their own

A knew the human being. Our search went on.
After lunch on September 30, 1 usco and I interrupted i
surpri*

toward Sproul Hull (the campus administration building) to

human cry a bushy-haired young man mount a chair to harangue a elm
students. He was Mario Savio, chairman of campus Friends of
a civil-rights group. He and four other* had been summoned
behind the speeches: dean s office for breaking university rules against overt political)
soliciting funds, recruiting members, organizing off-rampus d

"I M strations

Sproul Hall

my
dents are
on the campus. Would all of you, he asked, follow v
in a

"Huh!"

college days, he
I
show of solidarity against these unjust rules?
said to f usco. "He ll be lucky if be get* a daw
would probably have got none; but
more action-prone, and Berkeley ii the most
todi

"politii

campus in America, so I gave him a few. At 3 p.m., Savio

HERE." students into Sproul Hall, where they staged a 12-hour
lei

sit-i

dared the deans to punish them all.

B Y JOHN POPP Y UK,* s, My amazement was soon the amazement of everyone, incl
WHEN CLASSES started Berkeley last September, LOOK photog
at professors, administrators, university regents and thr nation.
rapher Paul r usco and
were on the campus interviewing dozens of
I Savio and seven others were suspended from the univenit;
professors and administrators. We wanted them to help us illustrate next day, resentful students set about deliberately breaking the j

an article about the benefits of California s huge investment in higher At 1 1 :45 a.m., a dean and a campus policeman told an ex-studett
education. We asked their help in finding a student who would carry refused to leave an illegal CORE recruiting table in front of Si

the riches of the university out into the world with him perhaps a "Hall that he was under arrest for trespassing, and led him to a 111

top young scientist who stretched himself in many directions, includ police car. Immediately, several hundred students surroundtj
ing the arts, off-campus politics, the coffeehouse scene. car and sat down. Events of the next 32 hours crystallized a p|
The professors and deans were very cordial. Most gave us lists of of student action that has lasted into 1965. About 3.000 student
honor students. "Now, what is this person like?" we would ask, point verged on Sproul Hall Plaza; several hundred other.- sat-in in S

ing to a name. Time after time, we heard: "Urn you know, 1

. .
thought I could help you, but I really don t see these people much."
We decided that many teachers had been fooling themselves.
Surrounded by 27,500 young people, they thought they knew students.
. Hall the roof of the trapped police car became a
itself;
platforj
a stream of orators, with Savio emerging as chief talker. Thejj
the speeches was simple: The students did not intend to diaper*
the administration removed all restrictions on "free speech"

N on- student Brad Cleaveland (left), author of a pamphlet urging "open, fierce rebellion" at Col, listens as Mario Savio orates.

In (Ac first dayt of tki

Berktlty upriting, VC
Pretident Clark Kent.
"IThat s to intellectuals

grabbing people by tkt

to form a picket line?"

 CAMPUS REVOLT..,,.
political activity on campus and pardoned the eight leaders. heeded Savio s call to battle before a December sit-in at Sproul Hal):
Evidently convinced that a small cadre of radicals was manipu when
the operation of the machine becomes so
"There is a time

lating the crowd, the Berkeley administration announced that a mob odious, makes you so sick at heart that you can t even tacitly take part,
could not force it to negotiate. California Cov. F.driunci C. Brown and you ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels,
declared, "This will not be tolerated." Unmoved, the demonstrators upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you ve got to make it stop.
stayed through the night and the next day, talking steadily. At dusk, And you ve got to indicate to the people who run it ... that unless
tension in the crowd suddenly became almost Mississippian; more you re free, the machines will be prevented from working at all."

than 500 armed, helmeted policemen were assembling behind Sproul That night, 779 were arrested, and the resulting classroom strike
Hall. Students began linking arms. very nearly did stop the machine.
Concerned faculty members had been trying to mediate between These methods of attack are truly frightening. Some extreme
students and administrators. Finally, University of California Presi leftistsdo mingle with the FSM, offering a convenient oversimplifica
dent Clark Kerr, a former labor arbitrator, decided to reverse the ad tion to those who see a Communist plot behind every disorder. More
ministration s stand. Just after dark, he signed an agreement that to the point, Professors Lipset and Seabury warn: The startling ". . .

elated the rebels. Not only would the cases of the eight suspended stu incomprehension or indifference shown by some of the best students
dents be reconsidered, but a faculty-student-administration committee in the country to the values of due process challenges the very . . .

would be created to study aspects of political behavior on cam

"all foundations of our democratic order. Instant justice demanded at the
pus."
The army of police left. The demonstrators dispersed. The cap point of a gun is no better than instant order. ... A whole generation
tured police car, its roof flattened, drove off. The next learn that ends justify any means. .
day, rebel lead may . ."

ers announced official formation of a

Speech Movement."
"Free One melancholy sight of the Berkeley disorders has been UC
Since then, the struggle between students and administration has President Clark Kerr, a man trapped by history. Neither Kerr nor the
surged back and forth across the Berkeley campus, with an increasingly people of California deliberately chose to create a state university that
alarmed faculty trying to make peace. FSM leaders continued to press students would revile as an assembly line. All along, he has glimpsed
demands whose details shifted with every clash, but which never de flaws in a multiversity that is, in his own words, an imperative ". . .

parted from two principles. The students want: rather than a reasoned choice among elegant alternatives. In the . . ."

1. To use the campus as a base for off -campus

political and social
1963 Godkin Lectures at Harvard, Kerr said a student revolt against
action without fear of punishment by the university. 2. To make faculty ". lack of faculty concern for teaching, endless rules and require
. .

and students the sole judges of educational policy, reducing adminis ments and impersonality would probably force curriculum
. . ."

trative officers to housekeepers "raising money, cleaning sidewalks, changes. Undergraduate teaching, he predicted, will have to be "reno
providing rooms for us to work in," as Savio puts it. vated," with the technology already at hand teaching machines, tele
The board of regents
the university s supreme ruling body vised lectures to free professors for more personal work with students.

agreed with President Kerr s conviction that "we must make sure
the university does not become a sanctuary for mounting illegal
actions off thecampus." The Berkeley faculty, however, was jarred
awake by the desperate ugliness of the students repeated attacks on
the administration. In December, the Academic Senate proposed a
peace plan that would satisfy almost all FSM demands. Many faculty
members admitted that students had voiced complaints before the up
As an afterthought: "... A few of the nonconformists have an
other kind of revolt in mind. They seek, instead, to turn the university,
on the Latin-American or Japanese models, into a fortress from which
they can sally forth with impunity to make their attacks on society."
Kerr may not have foreseen that some of those "nonconformists"
would carry forth both kinds of revolt with such passion. The Berkeley
rebels have been unreasonable. But they feel justified because they are

rising, but that "nobody was listening." attacking problems that should have been solved long ago. Like most
An
apparently simple dispute between activist students and uni- revolutionaries, they are harsh and inflexible. It should be easier
,versity officials which everyone in the state would have been relieved and more moral to deal with the problems than with the rebels. END
to think of as a kind of glorified panty raid was turning into what so

ciologist Seymour Martin Lipset and political scientist Paul Seabury

(both first-string Berkeley professors) call "the greatest crisis which UTIH
a major institution of higher learning in America has ever faced."
The crisis is great because students at Berkeley are making un
precedented demands on their elders. Politics and free speech spear
head their protest, but a powerful moral disquiet motivates it. They
are asking an old, respectable question: "Just what do you think an
education is /or?" University
presidents and professors have been
genteelly asking that of each other for years, and have seemed sat
isfied with abstract answers that were no answer at all. But now, the

And they demand an answer.

questioners are not genteel.
Young peopleMichael Rossman (and Mario Savio, who tem
like

porarily withdrew from the university ) do not like the world they live
in. They consider it
unjust and hypocritical. They have heard too
many phony promises from candidates who offer more opportunism
than leadership. They have seen the Government they are told to re
spect caught in deliberate lies, as in the U-2 incident. They know the
CNP rose $40 billion last year; they also know that families still starve.
And they see the continuation of Negro inequality as a huge moral evil.
"Where were you when the Jews were taken
away?" young Ger
mans ask their fathers. "What are you doing while the Negroes suf
fer?" these young Americans ask their elders. Dealing in moral terms,
not procedural ones, they insist that education inseparable from is

action. The civil-rights movement is a moral spur to these students. It

has also taught them how to make people stop ignoring them with
the powerful tactics of civil disobedience. Nearly 1,000 students
"1 hate to be a tpoil tport. Butch, but that
wasn t a police car after all."
 493

UNITED STATES NAVAL ACADEMY

ACADEMIC
ADVISORY BOARD

The purpose of the Board is to advise and assist the Superintendent

concerning the education of midshipmen. To accomplish this

objective, the Board will examine academic policies and practices

at the Naval Academy and submit proposals to the Superintendent

which will aid him in improving educational standards and in

solving academic problems.

1974-75
DR. GEORGE J. MA5LACH, Chairman
Provost, Professional Schools and Colleges. University of California (Berkeley)
Graduate of University of California has spent last 19 years at alma mater . . .

. . . named professor
of aeronautical engineering in 195e and dean of the
College of Engineering in 1964 primary research effort in fields of . . .

rarefied gas dynamics and heat transfer, fluid mechanics, and low density
aerodynamics facilities consultant to Office of Naval Research, U. S. . . .

Department of Commerce Technical Advisory Board, General Electric Company

Missile and Space Vehicles Department, and many others . . . member of
Americ in Society of Mechanical Engineers.

MR. ROGER 5. AHLBRANDT

Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Allegheny Ludlum Industries, Inc.
Graduate of the U. S. Naval Academy (Class of 1934) joined Ludlum Steel . . .

Corporation and became district manager, Allegheny Ludlum Steel Corporation,

1939-42 served in U. S. Navy, 1942-1945 and left service as lieutenant
. . .

commander served as treasurer of Allegheny Ludlum from 1951-1965,

. . .

became president in 1967 and chief executive officer in 1960 director of the . . .

Aiax Forging and Casting, Wallingfonn Steel. Arnold Engineering, Cormet,

and Mellon National Bank and Trust Companies and the Titanium Metals.
American True Temper, International Powder Metallurgy, Special Metals, and
Hammerhill Paper Corporations trustee of the Dollar Savings Bank and . . .

Shadyside Hospital Board of Directors. St. Margaret Memorial Hospital . . . . . .

member of the American Iron and Steel Institute, Pennsylvania Society, and
Newcomer Society.

MR. THOMAS L. BOARDMAN

Editor, Cleveland Press
Educated at Oberlin College, class of 1939 became a reporter for the . . .

Cleveland Press in 1939 served in the U. Navy, 1941-1945, assigned to . . . S.

demolition work left service as lieutenant commander was labor
. . . . . .

editor, assistant city editor and editorial writer of the Cleveland Press from
1945-1962 from 1962-1966 was editor, Scripps-Howard Indianapolis Timc.-
. . .

. returned to the Cleveland Press as editor in 1966 ... is a captain in the

. .

U. S. Naval Reserve member of the Greater Cleveland Growth Association . . .

chairman. Recreation Board, Shaker Heights, Ohio, 1960-1961; trustee.

Cuyahoga County Library 1957-1962; Sigma Delta Chi; immediate past ,

president. Cleveland Advertising Club; American Society of Editors

DR. JOHN T. BONNER, JR.

Vice President for Educational Services, The Ohio State University
Educated at the Ohio State University, receiving a Bachelor of Science degree
in 1943, the Master of Arts degree in 1946, and the Doctor of Philosophy
degree in 1954 . served as a captain in the Army during World War II,
. .

where
his decorations included the Purple Heart former president of . . .

Bonner, Inc.. Realtors, and of Wekh-Bonner Insurance. Inc. consultant to . . .

all levels of government and various business organizations author. . .

editor or contributor to over 40 books and articles covering the fields of

economics, business, finance, student personnel administration, and military
affairs has served as member of the Board of Governors of the National
. . .

Institute of Real Estate Brokers, president of the Columbus Sales Executives

Club, director of the Columbus Area Chamber of Commerce currently a . . .

member of the boards of the American Playwrights Theatre. Association of

the United States Army, Salesian Boys Club of Columbus, and Columbus
Council of the Navy League recent honors include the United States Navy- . . .

Distinguished Public Service Medal, the United States Army Outstanding

Civilian Service Medal, and the George Washington Honor Medal of the
Freedoms Foundation in Valley Forge.

ADMIRAL ROBERT B. CARNEY, USN (Retired)

Graduate of the U. S. Naval Academy (class of 1916), received an honorary-
Doctor of Laws degree in 1955 from Loras College commanded the . . .

US5 Denver, 1942-1943 was chief of staff to Admiral Halsey, 1943-1945 . . .

.
Deputy Chief of Naval Operations, 1946-1950
. . commanded the Second . . .

Fleet in 1950 was Commander-in-Chief. Allied Forces. Southern Europe.

. . .

1951-1953 Chief of Naval Operations. 1953-1955

. . . served as chairman . . .

of the board. Bath Iron Works, 1956-1967, chairman of the board. Bell
Intercontinental, 1960-1963 industrial consultant 1956 member of the . . . . . .

Society of Naval Architects and Marine Engineers. Society of Naval Engineers

and the Freedoms Foundation received Navy Cross, Distinguished Service . . .
Medal (3 gold stars). Legion of Merit with Combat "V." and Bronze Star
with Combat "V

MR. JOHN D. deBUTTS

Chairman of the Board of Directors, American Telephone and Telegraph Co.
Educated Virginia Military Institute (class of 1936), received his Doctor of
at
Laws degree from Knox College, Northwestern University, in 1966, and Doctor
of Laws degree from Loyola University, Chicago, 1967 served with the >n . . .

Chesapeake and Potomac Telephone Company in various capacities during

the period 1936-1962. became operating and engineering director, Chesapeake
and Potomac Telephone Company in 1959 worked for the American . . .

Telephone and Telegraph Company during the period 1949-1957 became . . .

assistant vice president government relations. AT&T, Washington, D.C. in 1957

. .was general manager. New York Telephone Company, 1958-1959
. . . .

president and director, Illinois Bell Telephone Company, 1962-1966 . . .

executive vice president, AT&T. New York City, 1966-1967 became vice . . .

chairman. Board of Directors. AT&T, New York City, 1967 ... is director of
the First National City Bank. New York; chairman of the board. National
Junior Achievement: honorary trustee. Chicago Museum of Science and
Industry, member of the Board of Visitors. Virginia Military Institute,
honorary life member. Board of Lay Trustees, Loyola University member . . .

of the Western Society of Engineers and the Armed Forces Communications

and Electronics Association.

DR. JOHN 1
5. DICKEY
President Emeritus. Dartmouth College
Educated at Dartmouth College. 1929. and Harvard Law School. 1932 .

honorary degrees from Tufts. Middlebury. Amherst. Oberlin. Bowdoin.

Rockford and Williams Colleges and Brown. Wesleyan. Columbia. Harvard.
Princeton. Bucknell. Notre Dame. McCill. and Toronto universities . . .

assistant to the commissioner Department of Correction. Massachusetts.

34 assistant Stair Department legal advisor and assistant to
1<>33-1 .

Assistant Secretary of State Francis B Sayre, 1934-193o special assistant to .

Secretary of State Cordell Hull. 1940 special assistant in office of

. . .

Nelson A Rockefeller Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs 1940-1944

chief. Division of World Trade Intelligence. Stair Department, 141 . .

Public liaison Officer. L S Delegation to the San Francisco Conference on

thr L nited Nations Charter. 145 president. Dartmouth College. 1945-197)
. .

Bi-Cf nirr.nial Prolr-sor of Public Affairs Dartmouth Coliepc 170 . . .

-
ber Board ot Trustees. Rockefeller Foundation and Charles F Kettermg
Foundation

DR. RICHARD C FOLSOM

President tmrritus Rrnssrlaer Polytechnic Institute

Chairman o! the 195 Curriculum Review Board tor the Naval Academy,
whose rrifmmendations sparked thr Acaderm s academic revolution" .

holds drprres from California Institute of Technology recipient of Cal . . .

Tech s Alumni Distinguished Service Award one of nation s top

authorities in thr theory and practice of fluid dynamics member ot several . .

scientific societies including theNational Academy of Engineers and the

Committee on Sonic Booms of the National Academy of Sciences . .

educational affiliations include the Secretary of the Navy s Advisory Board

for Educational Requirements. Committee on Organization in Engineering
Schools o( the Engineering Colleges Administrative Council, and others .

former director of the Engineering Research Institute and professor of

mechanical engineering at the University of Michigan appointed president . .

of RPI in 1958

MR. LUCIUS P. GREGG, JR.

Vice President. Persona! Banking Department. First National Bank of Chicago
President, University Finance Corporation

Graduate of the U. S. Naval Academy with distinction (class of 1955), received

a Master of Science degree in Aeronautics and Astronautics from the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1961 served as a pilot in the . . .

Air Force 1955-1965, at present major in Air Force Reserve director, office . . .

of research coordination and associate dean of sciences. Northwestern

University, 19o5-19c member of National Academy of Sciences Committee
.

on NASA/L niversity Relations. 1967-1969. Board of Trustees, University-

Research Association (National Accelerator Laboratory). 1967-l9o9.
Universities Organizing Committee for Space Research. 1965-1969; founding
member. Board of Governors of Lunar Science Institute. 1968-1970. Is a
member of the National Academy of Sciences Committee on the Role of U. S
Engineering Schools in Foreign Technical Assistance; Panel on Support for
Maritime Research and Education, U. S. Maritime Transportation Research
Board; Advisory Committee, Academies Council, National Academy of
Sciences; Board of Directors, National Conference of Christians and Jews . .

"Outstanding Young Engineer of 1964," Washington Academy of Sciences;

"Man of the Year," Service Guild of Evanston, 111., 1966; One of "Ten
Outstanding ^oung Men of 1966," Chicago Junior Association of Commerce
and Industry.

ADMIRAL ISAAC C. KIDD, JR., USN

Chief of Naval Material
Graduate of the U. S. Naval Academy (Class of 1942), National War
College
(1961) commanded US5 Ellyson, 1952-1953 and USS Barry, 1956-1958
. . .
. . .

Assistant Head, China-Northeast Asia Strategic Plans and Policy Division,

Joint Staff of Commander in Chief, Pacific, 1958-1960 commanded a . . .

destroyer division and destroyer squadrons, 1961-1962 Executive Assistant . . .

and Senior Aide to the Chief of Naval Operations, 1962-1966 Assistant . . .

Chief of Staff for Logistics, Commander in Chief Allied Forces, Southern Europe,
1966-1968 commanded First Fleet, 1969-1970
. . . commanded Sixth Fleet, . . .

1970-1971 received the Distinguished Service Medal, Legion of Merit with

. . .

two gold stars and the Bronze Star medal with Combat "V".

DR. ROBERT 5. LANCASTER

The University of the South
Professor of Political Science,
Received his Bachelor of Arts degree from Hampden-Sydney College in 1929,
Master of Arts degree from the University of the South in 1934, his Doctor of
Philosophy degree from the University of Michigan in 1952 served as an . . .

instructor at the Gulf Coast Military Academy, Gulfport Mississippi; Sewaner

(Tennessee) Military Academy, 1931-1938, was commandant of cadets,
1941-1943 and instructor from 1946-1949 was admitted to the Virginia bar . . .

in 137 became a member of the faculty of the University of the South in

. .

1949, and served as acting director of development, professor of political

science, dean of men, and dean of College of Arts and Science Fullbright . . .

lecturer at the College of Arts and Science, Baghdad, Iraq, and the
College of
Arts and Science and College of Law, Seoul National University, Korea
served as lieutenant (j.g.) in the U. S. Naval Reserve, 1943-1946 ... is
co-author of An Introduction to American Government, 1954 member of . . .

the Trllow International Institute of Arts and Letters, Virginia and Tennessee
Bar Associations, Southern Political Science Association, Phi Beta Kappa, Chi
Phi, Phi Kappa Phi, Sigma Upsilon, Tau Kappa, Pi Sigma Alpha, Blue Key
and Sowanee Civic Association.

MR. F. C. WISER, JR.

President, Trans World Airlines
[.ducated at Lehigh University, U. S. Naval Academy (class of 1944), and
Harvard Business School served in the U. S. Navy, 1944-1949 .
was. .
. . .

a Mstant to the vice president, Container

Corporation of America vice . .

president, Pittsburgh Standard Conduit Company vice president, American . . .

Airlines president. Northeast Airlines

. .
became president, Trans World . . .

Airlines in 1909 trustee of the U. S. Naval Academy Foundation

. . .
. .

member of the Fund Council of the Harvard Business School

 BOARD MEMBERSHIP

DR. GEORGE ]. MASLACH, Chairman

Provost, Professional Schools and Colleges
University of California (Berkeley)
Member since 1966 (July 1975)
MR. ROGER AHLBRANDT
Chairman and Chief Executive Officer
Allegheny Ludlum Industries, Inc.
Member since 1972 (July 1976)
MR. THOMAS L. BOARDMAN
Editor, Cleveland Press
Member since 1971 (July 1977)
DR. JOHN T. BONNER, JR.
Vice President for Educational Services
The Ohio State University
Member since 1972 (July 1975)
ADMIRAL ROBERT B. CARNEY, USN (Retired)
Member since 1971 (July 1978)
MR. JOHN D. deBUTTS
Chairman of the Board of Directors
American Telephone and Telegraph Company
Member since 1971 (July 1978)
DR. JOHN S. DICKEY
President Emeritus, Dartmouth College
Member since 1972 (July 1976)
DR. RICHARD G. FOLSOM
President Emeritus, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Member since 1966 (July 1975)
MR. LUCIUS P. GREGG, JR.
Vice President, Personal Banking Department,
First National Bank of Chicago
President, University Finance Corporation
Member since 1971 Quly 1978)
ADMIRAL ISAAC C. KIDD, JR., USN
Chief of Naval Material
Member since 1972 Guly 1976)
DR. ROBERT S. LANCASTER
Professor of Political Science
The University of the South
Member since 1971 (July 1977)
MR. F. C. WISER, JR.
President, Trans World Airlines
Member since 1970 (July 1977)

Expiration date in parentheses

498
 499

Delegation to the People s Republic of

China

DELEGATION
FROM
THE COLLEGE OF ENGINEERING
OF
THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA.
BERKELEY

THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

1979
 500

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 501 from Matrix , Decei
1978

History of the UC Berkele\

Past Presidents Back row, I. to r., Philip Bradley, Andre* C Marshall, J Ward Downey. Lou Oppenhe/m,
Ray Lundgren Front row, to I r., James McCarty (current president), Sam Clyde Bentley, Dean Huh
fluvArun,
Dean Huh chats with member ol Engineering Alum
Society in Japan

Past Presidents
Organization
vVien the first tew College of Engineering alum ot the Nominations Committee, gave his repor
Engineering Alumni Society
nimet in June of 1955 to organize an Engineer and the slate of officers drawn up by the com
Sm Ruvkun Jan 56 -jan 57 ing Alumni Society, their goals were wide- mittee was unanimously approved.
R 0. Brosemer Jan. 57 Jan 58
ranging, but their chief aim was quite simple The first Engineering Alumni Society Officers
Clyde E. Bentley Jan. 62 -Jan 63 They wanted to "form a strong alumni group were:
Francis B Tobias Jan 63 -Jan. 64 which can contribute to the welfare of the engi SamBuK U n(CE 41| President
Robert C. Andresen Jan 64 -Jan 65 neering colleges" both Berkeley and UCLA, RobenO BiDsemeMEE 25| Vice President & Director
Norman J. Peterson Jan. 65 -Jan. 66 although UCLA subsequently formed its own Clyde E Bentley (ME 23) Vice President & Director

Edgar O. May Jan 66 -Jan 67 group Eugene C CniadolME 50i Secretary and Director ol
Jan. 67 -Jan 68 Committee on Publicity ano
Philip Bradley The founding of the Society, according to the
Publications
Donald Doughty Jan 68 July 69 first recording secretary of the group, was an Joel Kitchens lE E 48i Treasurer & Director ol
Donald C. Bently July 69 -July 71 movement among engineering Membership Committee
outgrowth of "a

Andrew Marshall July 71 -July 72 graduates throughout California who felt that At that organizational meeting, a great many
Louis Riggs July 72 -July 73
upon graduation, their tie with the University problems of the University, the College, and
Victor W. Sauer July 73 July 74
and the College of Engineering should not be
J. Ward Downey 74 75 the profession were aired Dean L M K. Boeltei
July -July
severed, that the associations and friends made
Edgar J Garbanni July 75 -July 76 otUCLA, for example, indicated that one of hu
as students should be continued ."

Raymond Lundgren July 76 July 77 most pressing problems was maintaining a

Louis H Oppenheim 77 78
The Society actually took shape when a group staff in the light of significant inroads made
July July
of 16 engineers was called together by Andres on the faculty by tempting offers of large salar
F Oddstad (C.E. 41) and Dean of the College ies. Walter Dreyer (C.E. 16), discussed the

Southern California Chapter Morrough P. O Brien. At the Faculty Club on nation-wide shortage of engineers.
June 15, 1955, they discussed plans and aims, Some of the Society s stated purposes that
Edward Nov 75-June77 and during the summer and fall, there were
K. Rice night addressed themselves to such specific
Robert L Andresen July77-July78 meetings between the temporary officers- problems; some were more general.
Sam Ruvkun had been elected temporary chair
man and members of an already-existing en The alumni, those present thought, could offei
advice to the faculty on curriculum They coulc
gineering alumni group in Southern California.
Engineering Alumni Society help students secure jobs for vacations as wei
As Recording Secretary Eugene Chiado puts
Calendar as after graduation. They could provide needy
it: order to direct the energies and best fulfill
"In

students with scholarships They could advise

Wednesday FeDruary 7, 1979 Winter Dinner the wishes and desires of the engineering grad
students about the different phases of engi
Meeting uates, one of engineering s most important
neering that would be available to them when
Friday, May 18, 1979 Spring Luncheon tools was used organization." And organi
they graduated. In addition, alumni could help
Saturday. June 16. 1979 Commencement Greek zation was the order of the day when on Decem in some way to recruit high school students
Theatre. 1:30 p. m ber 6, 1955. at International House on the cam
to attend the University of California College o
pus a small group of California engineering
Engineering
graduates formed 6 committees: Faculty Liaison.
Engineering College Facilities, Student Rela
tions, High School Recruitment, Publicity and
Publication, and Membership.
To top off the organizational nature of the first
full meeting, Cyril M. Peletz (C.E. 41), Chairman
 502

gineering Alumni Society

At the end of Ruvkun s term, there were 128
alumni as active members of the Engineering
Alumni Society. The Society was de-activated,
S H l*t- i OTSSBBSW**
however, after the illness and untimely death of
the second president, Robert Brosemer, but
in 1962, it reformed under the presidency of

Clyde E. Bentley. From that time forward, the

Society has met regularly. As the organization
strengthened and grew, it established chapters
of Berkeley engineering alumni in Sacramento,
Southern California, and Hawaii. Most recently,
a chapter has been formed in Japan.

The Turning Point

In1968, the membership figures began to
mushroom, and in 1972, contributions began to
rise sharply (See figures, these pages.) How did
a small Society with modest means turn into
the 2500-member Society it is today? Some
former presidents were asked that question.
J.Ward Downey praises Don Bentley for acting -
vigorously during his term to keep the organi
70-71 7*-7 M-7 -TT 7B-T9
zation ahve and growing. "He accomplished
V" -iC-- Fiscal -Yn
this by appointing enthusiastic board members
some with top jobs in industry. These people To/8/s (to no/ include complimentary memberships extended to recent graduates
were able to get fellow alumni to join the Society
and start a growth pattern."
ALUMNI FUND CONTRIBUTIONS
Downey himself made what he calls small "a

contriDution to growth, too had Deen cus "It

tomary." he explains, send out application

"to

blanks to existing and potential members each

year asking them to renew or become a new
member in the Society suggested that an I

invoice be sent annually to engineering alumni

showing the amount of dues payable and space
for scholarship contributions. The alumni re
sponded to this ploy favorably and the number
of new members increased substantially over
the next few years."

Former President Philip Bradley remembers an

administrative problem and a solution. "The
problem lay in the lack of continuity from year
to year in paperwork and the like, a form of gap
between one set of officers and the next. The
solution lay in the appearance on the scene of
David Brown (1967), and in his appointment by
Dean Maslach as a permanent figurative king
bolt around which administrative affairs of the
Society became formally centered."

Former presidents themselves had varied rea

sons for joining the Society in the first place,
but many share Ed Garbarini s views. Attending
DC, Berkeley, had a major, favorable impact on
his life, he feels, and for a long time he in "felt Goals
debt to this great institution." His association
Engineering Alumni Society
with the Alumni Society has provided a way for
him partially repay the debt. He urges
"to
1. Support the College of Engineering in main b) Stimulate programs to inform the Universi
others to become involved in the Society s taining its national standing of engineering Faculty and Students as to what the Eng
work. Or, as Downey puts it, were to give "If I
excellence. neering Alumni are doing.
any advice to the younger engineering alumni, c) Provide closer interaction between Stu
it would be one becomes suc
to not wait until 2. Provide a liaison and a system of communi dents and Alumni through support ol the
cessful before doing something for the Univer cation between Faculty, Students, and the
Engineering Cooperative Work Study
sity of California." Engineering Community. Program.
James McCarty, current Engineering Alumni 3. Assist the College of Engineering in specia
a) Support programs to inform the Engineer
Society President, says that the main goal for fund raising campaigns.
ing and other University Alumni, and
his term is to increase membership to 3000 by
Industry as to what the College of Engi 4 Raise monies for the Dean s Discretionary
June, 1979 He is pleased to report that 80% neering is doing, especially in the areas Fund, to be used for purposes such as: schol.
of that goal has already been accomplished of new technologies. ships, equipment, and continuing educahoi
 503

April 2000

INTERVIEWS ON THE HISTORY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA

Documenting the history of the University of California has been a

responsibility of the Regional Oral History Office since the Office was
established in 1954. Oral history memoirs with University-related persons
are listed below. They have been underwritten by the UC Berkeley
Foundation, the Chancellor s Office, University departments, or by
extramural funding for special projects. The oral histories, both tapes
and transcripts, are open to scholarly use in The Bancroft Library.
Bound, indexed copies of the transcripts are available at cost to
manuscript libraries.

UNIVERSITY FACULTY, ADMINISTRATORS, AND REGENTS

Adams, Frank. Irrigation, Reclamation, and Water Administration. 1956,

491 pp.

Amerine, Maynard A. The University of California and the State s Wine

Industry. 1971, 142 pp. (UC Davis professor.)

Amerine, Maynard A. Wine Bibliographies and Taste Perception Studies.

1988, 91 pp. (UC Davis professor.)

Bierman, Jessie. Maternal and Child Health in Montana, California, the

U.S. Children s Bureau and WHO, 1926-1967. 1987, 246 pp.

Bird, Grace. Leader in Junior College Education at Bakersfield and the

University of California. Two volumes, 1978, 342 pp.

Birge, Raymond Thayer. Raymond Thayer Birge, Physicist. 1960, 395 pp.

Blaisdell, Allen C. Foreign Students and the Berkeley International

House, 1928-1961. 1968, 419 pp.

Blaisdell, Thomas C., Jr. India and China in the World War I Era; New
Deal and Marshall Plan; and University of California, Berkeley.
1991, 373 pp.

Blum, Henrik. Equity for the Public s Health: Contra Costa Health
Officer; Professor, UC School of Public Health; WHO Fieldworker.
1999, 425 pp.

Bowker, Albert. Sixth Chancellor, University of California, Berkeley,

1971-1980; Statistician, and National Leader in the Policies and
Politics of Higher Education. 1995, 274 pp.
 504

Brown, Delmer M. Professor of Japanese History, University of

California, Berkeley, 1946-1977. 2000, 410 pp.

Chaney, Ralph Works. Paleobotanist, Conservationist. 1960, 277 pp.

Chao, Yuen Ren. Chinese Linguist, Phonologist, Composer, and Author.

1977, 242 pp.

Constance, Lincoln. Versatile Berkeley Botanist: Plant Taxonomy and

University Governance. 1987, 362 pp.

Corley, James V. Serving the University in Sacramento. 1969, 143 pp.

Cross, Ira Brown. Portrait of an Economics Professor. 1967, 128 pp.

Cruess, William V. A Half Century in Food and Wine Technology. 1967,

122 pp.

Davidson, Mary Blossom. The Dean of Women and the Importance of

Students. 1967, 79 pp.

Davis, Harmer. Founder of the Institute of Transportation and Traffic

Engineering. 1997, 173 pp.

DeMars, Vernon. A Life in Architecture: Indian Dancing, Migrant

Housing, Telesis, Design for Urban Living, Theater, Teaching.
1992, 592 pp.

Dennes, William R. Philosophy and the University Since 1915. 1970,

162 pp.

Donnelly, Ruth. The University s Role in Housing Services. 1970,

129 pp.

Ebright, Carroll "Ky".

California Varsity and Olympics Crew Coach.
1968, 74 pp.

Eckbo, Garrett. Landscape Architecture: The Profession in California,

1935-1940, and Telesis. 1993, 103 pp.

Elberg, Sanford S. Graduate Education and Microbiology at the

University of California, Berkeley, 1930-1989. 1990, 269 pp.

Erdman, Henry E. Agricultural Economics: Teaching, Research, and

Writing, University of California, Berkeley, 1922-1969. 1971,
252 pp.

Esherick, Joseph. An Architectural Practice in the San Francisco Bay

Area, 1938-1996. 1996, 800 pp.

Evans, Clinton W. California Athlete, Coach, Administrator, Ambassador.

1968, 106 pp.
 505

Foster, Herbert B. The of the Engineer s Office in the Development

Rol>

of the University of California Campuses. 1960, 134 pp.

Gardner, David Pierpont. A Life in Higher Education: Fifteenth

President of the University of California, 1983-1992. 1997,
810 pp.

Grether, Ewald T. Dean of the UC Berkeley Schools of Business

Administration, 1943-1961; Leader in Campus Administration, Public
Service, and Marketing Studies; and Forever a Teacher. 1993,
1069 pp.

Hagar, Ella Barrows. Continuing Memoirs: Family, Community,

University. (Class of 1919, daughter of University President David
P. Barrows.) 1974, 272 pp.

Hamilton, Brutus. Student Athletics and the Voluntary Discipline.

1967, 50 pp.

Harding, Sidney T. A Life in Western Water Development. 1967, 524 pp.

Harris, Joseph P. Professor and Practitioner: Government, Election

Reform, and the Votomatic. 1983, 155 pp.

Hays, William Charles. Order, Taste, and Grace in Architecture. 1968,

241 pp.

Heller, Elinor Raas. A Volunteer in Politics, in Higher Education, and

on Governing Boards. Two volumes, 1984, 851 pp.

Helmholz, A. Carl. Physics and Faculty Governance at the University of

California Berkeley, 1937-1990. 1993, 387 pp.

Heyman, Ira Michael. (In process.) Professor of Law and Berkeley

Chancellor, 1980-1990.

Heyns, Roger W. Berkeley Chancellor, 1965-1971: The University in a

Turbulent Society. 1987, 180 pp.

Hildebrand, Joel H. Chemistry, Education, and the t/niversity of

California. 1962, 196 pp.

Huff, Elizabeth. Teacher and Founding Curator of the East Asiatic

Library: from Urbana to Berkeley by Way of Peking. 1977, 278 pp.

Huntington, Emily. A Career in Consumer Economics and Social Insurance.

1971, 111 pp.

Hutchison, Claude B. The College of Agriculture, University of

California, 1922-1952. 1962, 524 pp.

Jenny, Hans. Soil Scientist, Teacher, and Scholar. 1989, 364 pp.
 506

Johnston, Marguerite Kulp, and Joseph R. Mixer. Student Housing,

Welfare, and the ASUC 1970, 157 pp.
.

Jones, Mary C. Harold S. Jones and Mary C. Jones, Partners in

Longitudinal Studies. 1983, 154 pp.

Joslyn, Maynard A. A Technologist Views the California Wine Industry.

1974, 151 pp.

Kasimatis, Amandus N. A Career in California Viticulture. 1988, 54 pp.

(UC Davis professor.)

Kendrick, James B. Jr. From Plant Pathologist to Vice President for

Agricultural and Natural Resources, University of California,
1947-1986. 1989, 392 pp.

Kingraan, Harry L. Citizenship in a Democracy. (Stiles Hall, University

YMCA.) 1973, 292 pp.

Roll, Michael J. The Lair of the Bear and the Alumni Association, 1949-
1993. 1993, 387 pp.

Kragen, Adrian A. A Law Professor s Career: Teaching, Private Practice,

and Legislative Representation, 1934 to 1989. 1991, 333 pp.

Kroeber-Quinn, Theodora. Timeless Woman, Writer and Interpreter of the

California Indian World. 1982, 453 pp.

Landreth, Catherine. The Nursery School of the Institute of Child

Welfare of the University of California, Berkeley. 1983, 51 pp.

Langelier, Wilfred E. Teaching, Research, and Consultation in Water

Purification and Sewage Treatment, University of California at
Berkeley, 1916-1955. 1982, 81 pp.

Lehman, Benjamin H. Recollections and Reminiscences of Life in the Bay

Area from 1920 Onward. 1969, 367 pp.

Lenzen, Victor F. Physics and Philosophy. 1965, 206 pp.

Leopold, Luna. Hydrology, Geomorphology, and Environmental Policy: U.S.

Geological Survey, 1950-1972, and the UC Berkeley, 1972-1987.
1993, 309 pp.

Lessing, Ferdinand D. Early Years. (Professor of Oriental Languages.)

1963, 70 pp.

McGauhey, Percy H. The Sanitary Engineering Research Laboratory:

Administration, Research, and Consultation, 1950-1972. 1974,
259 pp.

McCaskill, June. Herbarium Scientist, University of California, Davis.

1989, 83 pp. (UC Davis professor.)
 507

McLaughlin, Donald. Careers in Mining Geology aid Management,

University Governance and Teaching. 1975, 318 pp.

Maslach, George J. Aeronautical Engineer, Professor, Dean of the

College of Engineering, Provost for Professional Schools and
Colleges, Vice Chancellor for Research and Academic Affairs,
University of California, Berkeley, 1949 to 1983. 2000, 523 pp.

May, Henry F. Professor of American Intellectual History, University of

California, Berkeley, 1952-1980. 1999, 218 pp.

Merritt, Ralph P. After Me Cometh a Builder, the Recollections of Ralph

Palmer Merritt. 1962, 137 pp. (UC Rice and Raisin Marketing.)

Metcalf, Woodbridge. Extension Forester, 1926-1956. 1969, 138 pp.

Meyer, Karl F. Medical Research and Public Health. 1976, 439 pp.

Miles, Josephine. Poetry, Teaching, and Scholarship. 1980, 344 pp.

Mitchell, Lucy Sprague. Pioneering in Education. 1962, 174 pp.

Morgan, Elmo. Physical Planning and Management: Los Alamos, University

of Utah, University of California, and AID, 1942-1976. 1992, 274 pp,

Neuhaus, Eugen. Reminiscences: Bay Area Art and the University of

California Art Department. 1961, 48 pp.

Newell, Pete. UC Berkeley Athletics and a Life in Basketball: Coaching

Collegiate and Olympic Champions; Managing, Teaching, and
Consulting in the NBA, 1935-1995. 1997, 470 pp.

Newman, Frank. Professor of Law, University of California, Berkeley,

1946-present, Justice, California Supreme Court, 1977-1983. 1994,
336 pp. (Available through California State Archives.)

Neylan, John Francis. Politics, Law, and the University of California.

1962, 319 pp.

Nyswander, Dorothy B. Professor and Activist for Public Health

Education in the Americas and Asia. 1994, 318 pp.

O Brien, Morrough P. Dean of the College of Engineering, Pioneer in

Coastal Engineering, and Consultant to General Electric. 1989,
313 pp.

Olmo, Harold P. Plant Genetics and New Grape Varieties. 1976, 183 pp.
(UC Davis professor.)

Ough, Cornelius. Recollections of an Enologist, University of

California, Davis, 1950-1990. 1990, 66 pp.
 508

Pepper, Stephen C. Art and Philosophy at the University of California,

1919-1962. 1963, 471 pp.

Pitzer, Kenneth. Chemist and Administrator at UC Berkeley, Rice

University, Stanford University, and the Atomic Energy Commission,
1935-1997. 1999, 558 pp.

Porter, Robert Langley. Physician, Teacher and Guardian of the Public

Health. 1960, 102 pp. (UC San Francisco professor.)

Reeves, William. Arbovirologist and Professor, UC Berkeley School of

Public Health. 1993, 686 pp.

Revelle, Roger. Oceanography, Population Resources and the World.

1988. (UC San Diego professor.) (Available through Archives,
Scripps Institute of Oceanography, University of California, San
Diego, La Jolla, California 92093.)

Riasanovsky, Nicholas V. Professor of Russian and European Intellectual

History, University of California, Berkeley, 1957-1997. 1998,
310 pp.

Richardson, Leon J. Berkeley Culture, University of California

Highlights, and University Extension, 1892-1960. 1962, 248 pp.

Robb, Agnes Roddy. Robert Gordon Sproul and the University of

California. 1976, 134 pp.

Rossbach, Charles Edwin. Artist, Mentor, Professor, Writer. 1987,

157 pp.

Schnier, Jacques. A Sculptor s Odyssey. 1987, 304 pp.

Schorske, Carl E. Intellectual Life, Civil Libertarian Issues, and the

Student Movement at the University of California, Berkeley, 1960-
1969. 2000, 203 pp.

Scott, Geraldine Knight. A Woman in Landscape Architecture in

California, 1926-1989. 1990, 235 pp.

Shields, Peter J. Reminiscences of the Father of the Davis Campus.

1954, 107 pp.

Sproul, Ida Wittschen. The President s Wife. 1981, 347 pp.

Stampp, Kenneth M. Historian of Slavery, the Civil War, and

Reconstruction, University of California, Berkeley, 1946-1983.
1998, 310 pp.

Stern, Milton. The Learning Society: Continuing Education at NYU,

Michigan, and UC Berkeley, 1946-1991. 1993, 292 pp.
 509

Stevens, Frank C. Forty Years in the Office of the President,

University of California, 1905-1945. 1959, 175 pp.

Stewart, George R. A Little of Myself. (Author and UC Professor of

English.) 1972, 319 pp.

Stripp, Fred S. Jr. University Debate Coach, Berkeley Civic Leader,

and Pastor. 1990, 75 pp.

Strong, Edward W. Philosopher, Professor, and Berkeley Chancellor,

1961-1965. 1992, 530 pp.

Struve, Gleb. (In process.) Professor of Slavic Languages and

Literature .

Taylor, Paul Schuster.

Volume I: Education, Field Research, and Family, 1973, 342 pp.
Volume II and Volume III: California Water and Agricultural Labor,
1975, 519 pp.

Thygeson, Phillips. External Eye Disease and the Proctor Foundation.

1988, 321 pp. (UC San Francisco professor.) (Available through
the Foundation of the American Academy of Ophthalmology.)

Tien, Chang-Lin. (In process.) Berkeley Chancellor, 1990-1997.

Towle, Katherine A. .Administration and Leadership. 1970, 369 pp.

Townes, Charles H. A Life in Physics: Bell Telephone Laboratories and

WWII, Columbia University and the Laser, MIT and Government
Service; California and Research in Astrophysics. 1994, 691 pp.

Underbill, Robert M. University of California: Lands, Finances, and

Investments. 1968, 446 pp.

Vaux, Henry J. Forestry in the Public Interest: Education, Economics,

State Policy, 1933-1983. 1987, 337 pp.

Wada, Yori. Working for Youth and Social Justice: The YMCA, the
University of California, and the Stulsaft Foundation. 1991,
203 pp.

Waring, Henry C. Henry C. Waring on University Extension. 1960,

130 pp.

Wellman, Harry. Teaching, Research and Administration, University of

California, 1925-1968. 1976, 259 pp.

Wessels, Glenn A. Education of an Artist. 1967, 326 pp.

Westphal, Katherine. Artist and Professor. 1988, 190 pp. (UC Davis
professor. )
 510

Whinnery, John. Researcher and Educator in Electromagnetics,

Microwaves, and Optoelectronics, 1935-1995; Dean of the College of
Engineering, UC Berkeley, 1950-1963. 1996, 273 pp.

Wiegel, Robert L. Coastal Engineering: Research, Consulting, and

Teaching, 1946-1997. 1997, 327 pp.

Williams, Arleigh. Dean of Students Arleigh Williams: The Free Speech

Movement and the Six Years War, 1964-1970. 1990, 329 pp.

Williams, Arleigh and Betty H. Neely. Disabled Students Residence

Program. 1987, 41 pp.

Wilson, Garff B. The Invisible Man, or, Public Ceremonies Chairman at

Berkeley for Thirty-Five Years. 1981, 442 pp.

Winkler, Albert J. Viticultural Research at UC Davis, 1921-1971. 1973,

144 pp.

Woods, Baldwin M. University of California Extension. 1957, 102 pp.

Wurster, William Wilson. College of Environmental Design, University of

California, Campus Planning, and Architectural Practice. 1964,
339 pp.

MULTI- INTERVIEWEE PROJECTS

Blake Estate Oral History Project. 1988, 582 pp.

Architects landscape architects, gardeners, presidents of UC
document the history of the UC presidential residence. Includes
interviews with Mai Arbegast, Igor Blake, Ron and Myra Brocchini,
Toichi Domoto, Eliot Evans, Tony Hail, Linda Haymaker, Charles
Hitch, Flo Holmes, Clark and Kay Kerr, Gerry Scott, George and
Helena Thacher, Walter Vodden, and Norma Wilier.

Centennial History Project, 1954-1960. 329 pp.

Includes interviews with George P. Adams, Anson Stiles Blake,
Walter C. Blasdale, Joel H. Hildebrand, Samuel J. Holmes, Alfred L.
Kroeber, Ivan M. Linforth, George D. Louderback, Agnes Fay Morgan,
and William Popper. (Bancroft Library use only.)

Thomas D. Church, Landscape Architect. Two volumes, 1978, 803 pp.

Volume I: Includes interviews with Theodore Bernardi, Lucy Butler,
June Meehan Campbell, Louis De Monte, Walter Doty, Donn Emmons ,

Floyd Gerow, Harriet Henderson, Joseph Howland, Ruth Jaffe, Burton

Litton, Germano Milano, Miriam Pierce, George Rockrise, Robert
Royston, Geraldine Knight Scott, Roger Sturtevant, Francis Violich,
and Harold Watkin.
Volume II: Includes interviews with Maggie Baylis, Elizabeth
Roberts Church, Robert Glasner, Grace Hall, Lawrence Halprin,
Proctor Mellquist, Everitt Miller, Harry Sanders, Lou Schenone,
Jack Stafford, Goodwin Steinberg, and Jack Wagstaff.
 511

Interviews with Dentists. ("Dental History Project, University of

California, San Francisco.) 1969, 1114 pp. Includes interviews
with Dickson Bell, Reuben L. Blake, Willard C. Fleming, George A.
Hughes, Leland D. Jones, George F. McGee, C. E. Rutledge, William
B. Ryder, Jr., Herbert J. Samuels, Joseph Sciutto, William S.
Smith, Harvey Stallard, George E. Steninger, and Abraham W. Ward.
(Bancroft Library use only.)

Julia Morgan Architectural History Project. Two volumes, 1976, 621 pp.
Volume 1: The Work of Walter Steilberg and Julia Morgan, and the
Department of Architecture, UCB, 1904-1954.
Includes interviews with Walter T. Steilberg, Robert Ratcliff,
Evelyn Paine Ratcliff, Norman L. Jensen, John E. Wagstaff, George
C. Hodges, Edward B. Hussey, and Warren Charles Perry.

Volume II: Julia Morgan, Her Office, and a House.

Includes interviews with Mary Grace Barron, Kirk 0. Rowlands, Norma
Wilier, Quintilla Williams, Catherine Freeman Nimitz, Polly
Lawrence McNaught Hettie Belle Marcus, Bjarne Dahl, Bjarne Dahl,
,

Jr., Morgan North, Dorothy Wormser Coblentz, and Flora d llle

North.

The Prytaneans: An Oral History of the Prytanean Society and its

Members. (Order from Prytanean Society.)
Volume I: 1901-1920, 1970, 307 pp.
Volume II: 1921-1930, 1977, 313 pp.
Volume III: 1931-1935, 1990, 343 pp.

Six Weeks in Spring, 1985: Managing Student Protest at UC Berkeley.

887 pp. Transcripts of sixteen interviews conducted during July-
August 1985 documenting events on the UC Berkeley campus in April-
May 1985 and administration response to student activities
protesting university policy on investments in South Africa.
Interviews with: Ira Michael Heyman, chancellor; Watson Laetsch,
vice chancellor; Roderic Park, vice chancellor; Ronald Wright, vice
chancellor; Richard Hafner, public affairs officer; John Cummins
and Michael R. Smith, chancellor s staff; Patrick Hayashi and B.
Thomas Travers, undergraduate affairs; Mary Jacobs, Hal Reynolds,
and Michelle Woods, student affairs; Derry Bowles, William Foley,
Joseph Johnson, and Ellen Stetson, campus police. (Bancroft
Library use only.)

Robert Gordon Sproul Oral History Project. Two volumes, 1986, 904 pp.
Includes interviews with thirty-five persons who knew him well:
Horace M. Albright, Stuart LeRoy Anderson, Katherine Connick
Bradley, Franklin M. Brown, Ernest H. Burness, Natalie
"Dyke"

Cohen, Paul A. Dodd, May Dornin, Richard E. Erickson, Walter S.

Frederick, David P. Gardner, Marion Sproul Goodin, Vernon L.
Goodin, Louis H. Heilbron, Robert S. Johnson, Clark Kerr, Adrian A.
Kragen, Mary Blumer Lawrence, Stanley E. McCaffrey, Dean McHenry,
Donald H. McLaughlin, Kendric Morrish, Marion Morrish, William Penn
Mott, Jr., Herman Phleger, John B. deC. M. Saunders, Carl W.
 512

Sharsmith, John A. Sproul, Robert Sordon Sproul, Jr., Wallace

Sterling, Wakefield Taylor, Robert M. Underbill, Eleanor L. Van
Horn, Garff B. Wilson, and Pete L. Yzaguirre.

The University of California during the Presidency of David P. Gardner,

1983-1992. (In process.)
Interviews with members of the university community and state
government officials.

The Women s Faculty Club of the University of California at Berkeley,

1919-1982. 1983, 312 pp.
Includes interviews with Josephine Smith, Margaret Murdock, Agnes
Robb, May Dornin, Josephine Miles, Gudveig Gordon-Britland,
Elizabeth Scott, Marian Diamond, Mary Ann Johnson, Eleanor Van
Horn, and Katherine Van Valer Williams.

UC BERKELEY BLACK ALUMNI ORAL HISTORY PROJECT

Broussard, Allen. A California Supreme Court Justice Looks at Law and

Society, 1969-1996. 1997, 266 pp.

Ferguson, Lloyd Noel. Increasing Opportunities in Chemistry, 1936-1986.

1992, 74 pp.

Gordon, Walter A. Athlete, Officer in Law Enforcement and

Administration, Governor of the Virgin Islands. Two volumes, 1980,
621 pp.

Jackson, Ida. Overcoming Barriers in Education. 1990, 80 pp.

Patterson, Charles. Working for Civic Unity in Government, Business,

and Philanthropy. 1994, 220 pp.

Pittman, Tarea Hall. NAACP Official and Civil Rights Worker. 1974,
159 pp.

Poston, Marvin. Making Opportunities in Vision Care. 1989, 90 pp.

Rice, Emmett J. Education of an Economist: From Fulbright Scholar to

the Federal Reserve Board, 1951-1979. 1991, 92 pp.

Rumford, William Byron. Legislator for Fair Employment, Fair Housing,

and Public Health. 1973, 152 pp.

Williams, Archie. The Joy of Flying: Olympic Gold, Air Force Colonel,
and Teacher. 1993, 85 pp.

Wilson, Lionel. Attorney, Judge, Oakland Mayor. 1992, 104 pp.

 513

UC BERKELEY CLASS OF 1931 ENDOWMENT SERIES, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA,

SOURCE OF COMMUNITY LEADERS (OUTSTANDING ALUMNI)

Bennett, Mary Woods (class of 1931). A Career in Higher Education:

Mills College 1935-1974. 1987, 278 pp.

Bridges, Robert L. (class of 1930). Sixty Years of Legal Advice to

International Construction Firms; Thelen, Marrin, Johnson and
Bridges, 1933-1997, 1998, 134 pp.

Browne, Alan K. (class of 1931). Municipal Bond": Bond Investment

"Mr.

Management, Bank of America, 1929-1971. 1990, 325 pp.

Coliver, Edith (class of 1943). (In process.) Foreign aid specialist.

Dettner, Anne Degruchy Low-Beer (class of 1926). A Woman s Place in

Science and Public Affairs, 1932-1973. 1996, 260 pp.

Devlin, Marion (class of 1931). Women s News Editor: Vallejo Times-

Herald, 1931-1978. 1991, 157 pp.

Hassard, H. Howard (class of 1931). The California Medical Association,

Medical Insurance, and the Law, 1935-1992. 1993, 228 pp.

Hedgpeth, Joel (class of 1931). Marine Biologist and Environmentalist:

Pycnogonids, Progress, and Preserving Bays, Salmon, and Other
Living Things. 1996, 319 pp.

Heilbron, Louis (class of 1928). Most of a Century: Law and Public

Service, 1930s to 1990s. 1995, 397 pp.

Kay, Harold (class of 1931). A Berkeley Boy s Service to the Medical

Community of Alameda County, 1935-1994. 1994, 104 pp.

Kragen, Adrian A. (class of 1931). A Law Professor s Career: Teaching,

Private Practice, and Legislative Representative, 1934 to 1989.
1991, 333 pp.

Peterson, Rudolph (class of 1925). A Career in International Banking

with the Bank of America, 1936-1970, and the United Nations
Development Program, 1971-1975. 1994, 408 pp.

Stripp, Fred S. Jr. (class of 1932). University Debate Coach, Berkeley

Civic Leader, and Pastor. 1990, 75 pp.

Trefethen, Eugene (class of 1930). Kaiser Industries, Trefethen

Vineyards, the University of California, and Mills College, 1926-
1997. 1997, 189 pp.
 514

UC BERKELEY ALUMNI DISCUSS THE UNIVERSITY

Griffiths, Farnham P. (class of 1906). The University of California and

the California Bar. 1954, 46 pp.

Ogg, Robert Danforth (class of 1941). Business and Pleasure:

Electronics, Anchors, and the University of California. 1989,
157 pp.

Olney, Mary McLean (class of 1895). Oakland, Berkeley, and the

University of California, 1880-1895. 1963, 173 pp.

Selvin, Herman F. (class of 1924). The University of California and

California Law and Lawyers, 1920-1978. 1979, 217 pp.

Shurtleff, Roy L. (class of 1912). The University s Class of 1912,

Investment Banking, and the Shurtleff ^Family History. 1982, 69 pp.

Stewart, Jessie Harris (class of 1914). Memories of Girlhood and the

University. 1978, 70 pp.

Witter, Jean C. (class of 1916). The University, the Community, and the
Lifeblood of Business. 1968, 109 pp.

DONATED ORAL HISTORY COLLECTION

Almy, Millie. Reflections of Early Childhood Education: 1934-1994.

1997, 89 pp.

Cal Band Oral History Project. An ongoing series of interviews with Cal
Band members and supporters of Cal spirit groups. (University
Archives, Bancroft Library use only.)

Crooks, Afton E. On Balance, One Woman s Life and View of University of

California Management, 1954-1990: An Oral History Memoir of the
Life of Afton E. Crooks. 1994, 211 pp.

Weaver, Harold F. Harold F. Weaver, California Astronomer. 1993,

165 pp.
 515

INDEX--George J. Maslach

Adams, Charles Francis, 151-154 Boelter, Lewellyn K. , 121-123,

aerodynamics, research and design, 312, 471
223-224, 231-237, 240, 270 Boston, Massachusetts, and
Agnew, Spiro, 459 environs, 150-157, 170-178
Air Force, United States, 184, Bottari, Vic, 326
191, 240, 297, 396 Bowker, Albert, 257, 281, 292,
air pollution, 336-338, 382 349, 370, 398-399, 401-404,
Alvarez, Luis, 144-145, 160, 165, 406-407, 413, 419-421, 430,
376 432, 439-446, 452-456, 459-466,
American Institute of Chemical 472
Engineers, 229-230 Bowker, Rosedith, 401-402, 453
American Society of Engineering Boy Scouts of America, 30-31, 41-
Education, 243 42, 48, 62-68, 75-76, 105, 324-
Anderson, Roxanne 193-194 , 325
Andreasen, Bob, 318-319 Bridges, Harry, 76
Andrews, Bill, 41, 52-54, 80-81, Brockerschraidt, Henry "Hank," 124
90, 95 Brown, David, 272-274, 292, 410,
Andrews, Helen, 53-54, 80 416
Anino, Bob, 69 Brown, Edmund 202
"Pat,"

Atkinson, Richard, 43 Brown, Jerry, 438-439

Auslander, Vivian, 361 Bundy, McGeorge, 331, 334-335
Avakian, "Sparky," 324-325, 379 Bureau of Labor Statistics, United
States, 281, 287
Bush, Vannevar, 167-168
Baden-Powell, Lord Robert, 31 Butler, Johnny, 124
Bainbridge, Ken, 178
Bainer, Roy, 287-288
Barber, 398
"Buzz," Caen, Herb, 401
Bartholomew, Mr., 77, 86 Cal Engineer, 318-320, 366
Bechtel Corporation, 443-444 California, state higher education
Bechtel, Steve Sr., 444 system, 100-101, 285-287
Berdahl, Robert, 466 Galloway, Doris, 454
Benton, Andy, 87-88 Calvin, Mel, 396
Berkeley, California, 380-381, Carey, Ben, 205-206
395 Castro, Fidel, 288
school board, 325-327, 378-380 Chamberlin, Owen, 424
Berkeley Foundation, 439-440 Chance, Britt, 145
Birge, Raymond T., 265 Chernin, Milton, 410, 445
Blackwell, David, 398, 428 Chicago, Illinois, 4, 129-133
Blaney, David, 155 Christensen, Mark, 411, 413, 431,
Blaney, Dwight, 154-155, 172-174 451, 455-456, 464
Blaney, Elizabeth, 154-157, 170- Christopherson, Al, 62-68
172, 174 Clifford, Clark, 387-388, 391
Blaney, Sir Henry, 154 Clubb, Louise, 448
 516

Cohelan, Jeffrey, 324-325, 328, College of Engineering, UC

393 (cont d. )

College of Engineering, UC promotion and tenure, system

administrative staff, 271-273, of, 260-267, 315-316, 368
279 ranking, 257, 313-314, 344-345
budget, 277-280, 369-370 reorganization of, 244-258,
Computer Science Division, 264-269
292-29A, 370, 405 research, funding for, 215-
curriculum, 294-295, 321-322, 217, 357
364-365, 404 service to industry, 201
Dean s Coordinating Council, students and student groups,
248-250, 260, 300 316-318, 320-321, 367-368,
Department of Civil 370
Engineering, 294, 369 students, recruitment of, 280-
Department of Electrical 287, 289-292, 356-361, 370,
Engineering, 292-294, 365, 435
474-475 teaching in, 195-200, 366
Department of Industrial undergraduate curriculum, 256-
Engineering, 292, 295, 369 258
Department of Materials and women students, 361, 435
Mineral Engineering, 295 World War II, and, 43
Department of Mechanical Constance, Lincoln, 315
Engineering, 42, 194, 244- Cousteau, Jacques, 372
245, 249, 294 Culiner, Helen, 180
Department of Naval Cuneo, Billie, 187
Architecture and Offshore Curry, Ma and Pa, 72-73
Engineering, 244, 295, 475 Curtis, Ann, 26
Department of Nuclear
Engineering, 295
development of graduate David, Narsai, 456
program, 195, 243-244, 249 Davidson, Lynn, 263, 417
electonics research program, Davis, Harmer, 244, 250, 254,
215-217 267, 274, 294
Engineering Alumni Society, Debreu, Gerard, 377
318-319, 321, 366-367 Deckman, Jean, 86-87
Engineers Joint Council (EJC) , DeGarmo, E. Paul, 113-114
316-318, 320, 366 Department of Commerce, United
faculty, 356-357, 369 States, 296-298, 328-330, 363,
fund raising for, 321, 357, 394
441-442 Department of Defense, United
Institute of Engineering States, 382-388
Research, 201, 203-204, Department of Interior, United
208-217, 244, 249 States, 297, 336
minority students, 359-361, Depression, the Great, 27-28, 30,
435 47-48, 76-79, 89-90, 96-97,
Office of Research Services. 101, 120-121
See Institute of Engineering Deukmejian, George, 439
Research Deutsch, Monroe, 265, 403
 517

Devienne, Marcel and Jaqueline, Goldberg, Rube, 112

239 Goldman, Richard, 92
Dewey, Thomas E., 186 Goldsmith, Werner, 205-206, 427
Dibble, Frank, 186 Goodrich, George, 30
Dorn, John, 244 Gordon, Duane, 134
Drake, Robert, 122, 358 Goudsmit, Samuel A., 266
Droz, Marcel, 180, 183 Grenzbach, Bob, 124, 145
DuBridge, Lee, 164, 167, 178, Grether, Ewald, 315
299, 336-337, 339, 459 Guillaume, Roland, 234
Durkin, Ned, 470 Guthrie, Dick, 53-54

Eberhart, Frances (Woertendyke) , Hagerty, Fran, 157-158, 170

1, 42-44, 119, 209-210, 246, Hale, Al, 200
248, 262-264, 271-273, 410 Hansen, Raymond, 62
Eberhart, Howard, 44, 272, 334 Ham, Lee, 86-87
Einstein, Hans Albert, 205-206, Haworth, Lee, 165-166,181
451 Hayakawa, S.I., 331-332
Elberg, Sanford "Sandy," 209, Herrero, Bob, 113
309, 341-345, 413, 416, 420- Heyman, Michael, 371, 432, 452-
421, 452 454, 460-461, 465
Environmental Protection Agency, Heyns, Mrs. Roger, 402
United States, 336, 339 Heyns, Roger, 276, 300, 339, 349,
Erickson, Dick, 439 355, 396-399, 413, 429, 472
Esherick, Joe, 467-468 Hicklin, Shirley, 86
Evans, Griffith C., 265 Higginbottom, Willie, 178
Hildebrand, Joel, 375
Hilgard, Eugene W. 414
,

Fahd, Crown Prince, 286 Hinds, Norman, 376, 427

Farber, Leonard, 206-207 Hodgen, Joseph D. , 208
Federal Aviation Administration, Hoffman, Allen, 126, 129-132,
332 140-141, 143
Flanagan, Tom, 447-448 Holloman, Herb, 296, 328-330,
Folsom, Richard, 42, 117, 189, 335, 382-387
193, 231, 327
250, Horning, Don, 190
Ford Foundation, 331, 333-335 Hoover, Herbert, 24, 96, 325
Fretter, Bill, 293, 447 Humphrey, Hubert, H., 336, 384-
Freud, Anna, 372 387, 391, 426
Hurlbut, Frank, 193, 250
Hughes, Art, 172
Galloway, Dennis, 359 Hutson, Art, 276
Gardner, David, 453-454
Garland, Clyne, 194-195, 201
Carman, Ray, 156, 180, 183 influenza, 1918-1919 epidemic,
General Precision Laboratories, 15-16
182-187 Ironbound Island, Maine, 173-174
G.I. Bill, 432
Glaser, Don, 378
Goldberg, Arthur, 303 Jackson, Henry "Scoop,"
336
 518

Jacob, Professor, 101 Levy, Hans, 208

Jewell, Bill, 274 Lewis, Gilbert N. 265
,

Johnson, George, 30, 205 Lindsay, John, 372

Johnson, Hiram, 24, 78 Look, 354, 362-364
Johnson, Lyndon B., 336, 385, Loomis, Alfred, 167
387, 390, 394, 426 Loomis, F. Wheeler, 164
Johnson, Mrs. Lyndon, 335-336 Lowe, Harry, 70, 73-74
Johnston, Harold, 337-338 Lubermirski family, 108
Jolly, Bill, 428 Lurie, Henry, 366
Jordan, Denny, 260 Lynn, Stuart, 462-464, 472
Lyon, Miss, 78

Radish, Sanford "Sandy," 398-400

Kaiser, Henry, 50 Mailliard, Bill, 24, 325, 333,
Kaiser Medical Corporation, 470- 381
471 Maisel, Sherman, 379
Kane, Enos, 189-193 Manville, Hiram, 183
Karelitz, [George? Michael?], 186 Markowitz, Sam, 428
Kelly, Elizabeth, 470 Marshall, Larry, 121-123, 475
Kennedy, John F. ,323, 353, 370, Martinelli, Ernie, 124, 158, 179-
386, 394, 458 180
Kennedy, Robert, 384, 392-393 Martinelli, Ray, 117, 122
Kennedy, Ted, 323, 384 Maslach, Anna (nee Pszczolkowska,
Kerley, Bob, 452 mother), 1, 4-6, 8-16, 20, 24,
Kerr, Clark, 202, 241, 245-246, 26, 36-37, 44-45, 52-53, 63,
248, 251, 258-259, 275, 289, 132, 325
306, 311-315, 321, 341-347, Maslach, Michael J. (father), 1-
355-356, 362-363, 369, 392, 417 16, 20-25, 31, 36-37, 63, 85,
Ketcham, Frank, 278, 280, 437-438 95-96, 108-109, 325, 378
King, Starr, 328 Maslach, Christina (daughter), 2,
Knowland, Senator William, 301- 24, 43, 85, 175, 181-182, 185,
302 223, 227, 229, 233, 237-241,
Knight, Walter, 365, 407 247, 259, 325, 353-354, 434-
Knox, Bob, 272 435, 467
Kragen, Adrian, 345 Maslach, Dillon (grandson), 469
Kuh, Ernie, 292, 294, 314, 345, Maslach, Doris (nee Cuneo, wife),
397, 442 77, 86-91, 93, 95, 109-110,
123-124, 138, 147, 155, 169,
170-178, 180-182, 187, 237-241,
Lafaurie, Michel, 28, 37, 58-60, 250, 259, 275, 300, 325-326,
84, 86 328, 345-346, 3.78-380, 391,
Laitone, Ed, 358 426, 468
Lane, Violetta, 42, 118-119, 283- Maslach, Jamie (son), 129, 185,
284, 367 233, 237-241, 247, 259, 354
Lankhammer, Nancy, 433 Maslach, Michael (brother), 61-
Latimer, Wendell M. 376, 427
, 62, 107, 120
Lawson, James, 143-144 Maslach, Sophie (sister), 61-62,
Leighton Industries, San 120
Francisco, California, 12-13
 519

Maslach, Steve (son), 233, 237- O Brien, Morrough "Mike" P., 1,

241, 247, 259, 354, 469 42-43, 118, 189, 204, 209-211,
Massachusetts Institute of 231, 243-248, 250, 257, 262,
Technology, 295-296, 386, 466. 265, 271, 315, 405, 409
See also Radiation Laboratory, Office of Civil Rights, 430-434,
MIT 445
Matt, Rudi, 238 Office of Naval Research, 191-
Mauchlan, Errol, 278, 292, 345- 193, 201, 232, 240, 430, 432,
346, 348-349, 370, 452 467
McKie, Roy and Tuddy, 175 Oppenheimer, J. Robert, 376
McLaughlin, Donald H., 292, 340- Owen, Akiko, 255
344, 350, 375, 475
McMillan, Edwin Mattison, 165,
227, 300, 374 Park, Nancy, 278
Menuhin, Yehudi, 21, 25 Park, Roderic, 257, 289, 407-408,
Merriam, Lathe, 199 411, 419, 434-435, 446-447,
Metzger, Mrs., 78, 91 452-453, 476
Meyer, Ed and Marjorie, 156, 176 Parker, Earl, 244, 250-251, 253-
Meyerson, Martin, 276, 300-301, 255, 267, 274, 328
311, 341-349, 398-399 Paderewski, Ignatz, 24-25, 325
Morrin, Earl, 117, 122 Peat Marwick Company, 439-440
Mosconos, Angelina, 88 Perelman, Isidor, 418
Mt. Hamilton Observatory, 219-223 Peterson, Don, 244, 250
Peterson, Gene, 428
photographic equipment, design of,
Nathan, Ed and Harriet, 92 184-185
National Aeronautics and Space Pimentel, George, 299, 362
Administration (NASA), 190- Pister, Karl, 369
191, 232, 240, 296, 362 pitot tube, 190-191
National Defense Research Council, Platt, Tony, 421, 429-430
120, 167 Pomona Pump Company, 118
National Science Foundation, 299, Post, Alan, 437
339, 359, 362 Powell, Mike, 67-68
Nauta, Mrs . 118
, Powell, Richard, 471
Navy, United States, 204, 297, prohibition, 18, 84
327-330, 382, 393-394, 458-459 Purcell, Edward Mills, 165
Nehru, 370
Newman, Frank, 310-311, 341-345
Nichols, Roy, 379 Rabi, Isidor Isaac, 165-167
Nitze, Paul, 330, 394 Radiation Laboratory, MIT
Nixon, Richard M. 339, 394, 458-
, declassification of, 178-180
459 design of radar systems, 145,
North Atlantic Treaty Organization 148-150, 158-163
(NATO), 233 impact of, 128-129
intensive wartime curriculum,
146-147
Manhattan Project, and, 178
military specialists, 383, 388
naval design, 160-162
 520

Radiation Laboratory, MIT San Francisco, California

(cont d. ) (cont d. )
security, 126-127, 140-141 labor unions and strikes, 76-
social networks, 158-170 77, 134-135
work culture, 158-160, 164 libraries, 29-30, 38-39, 46,
work environment, 139-144 107, 473
Raleigh, Jack, 411 Lone Mountain District, 13-14,
Rand, Sally, 106 20
Ravizza, Doris, 86 McAllister Street, 17
Reagan, Ronald, 355 Mission District, 10-12
Reinhard, Bob, 113 nightlife, 1930s, 48-50, 53,
Renoir, Alan, 226-227 67-68, 81-82, 84, 87, 106,
Rivero, Horacio "Rivets," 329 137-138
Roberti, Senator David A., 437 outdoor recreation, 52-54, 58-
Rockwell, Mr., 79 59, 105-106
Roebling Company landing crafts, Polish community, 3, 7, 20-21,
117-118 , 23-24

Rolph, "Sunny Jim," 17 population, 7, 104

Rosenthal, Joe, 459 prostitution, 83
Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 78, restaurants, 28-29, 37-38, 82,
96, 325 88-89, 104
Rossi, (mayor of San Francisco), sand dunes, 13, 20, 45-46, 104
22 schools, 36, 38, 40-41, 44-45,
Roy, April, 415, 439, 460 77-85, 90-94, 241
Rumford, Byron, 333, 381-382 transportation, pre-World War
Rusk, Dean, 389-390 II, 18-20, 33, 40, 88, 99-
100, 105
wine making, 18-19
Sachrison, Dave, 463 World s Fair of 1939, 79-80,
Saltonstall, Senator Leverett, 94-95, 106
147 San Francisco Junior College, 98-
Sammett, Loy 411 , 99, 102
San Francisco, California San Francisco State University,
Barrett and Hilp construction 331
company, 133-137 Sanazaro, Paul, 325, 378
Bayview/Hunter s Point, 60 Sargent, John Singer, 154-155
Benedetti family, 17-20 Save San Francisco Bay
boating and ships, 50-51, 56- Association, 315
57, 60, 90, 133, 260, 407- Savio, Mario, 303-305, 347, 352,
408, 468-469 355, 363
Catholic churches, 26-27 Saxon, David, 453-454, 458-459
earthquake, 4-5 Schade, Henry H. "Packy," 203,
ethnic groups and 210, 244, 254, 295
neighborhoods, 7, 21, 22- Schaff, Sam, 193, 250-251, 379
24, 28-29, 37-38, 60, 81-82, Schlichting, Gunterf?], 234-235
86-87, 134, 381 Science, 382-383
gangs, 34-35 Scovill, Edith, 431
housing, pre-World War II, 8, Sea Scouts, 50-51, 107, 133
10, 39-41
 521

Seaborg, Glenn, 227, 241, 251, Teller, Edward, 376, 462

315, 368, 373-375, 378, 424 Terman, Frederick E., 403
Searcy, Alan, 348 Thant, U, 389
Searle, John, 348 Thomas, Norman, 186
Seed, Harry Bolton, 250, 253, 294 Tien, Chang-Lin, 122, 357-359,
Segre, Emilio, 424-425 405, 450-451, 465, 477
Sharp, Vic, 42, 62-68 Tilton, Pete, 124
Shen, J.T. [?] 377
, Tobias, Charlie, 338, 427
Sherman, Frederick, 193, 224, 358 Towle, Katherine, 302-303
Sherriffs, Alex, 306, 311, 346 Townes, Charlie, 128, 392, 426,
Shreve, Crump, and Lowe, 458
silversmiths, 169 Townes, Frances, 426
Shultz, George, 298 Tramontolo, Chauncey, 22, 24
Sibley, Bob, 380 Trefethen, Gene, 440
Sibley, Carol, 380 Tresidder, Donald B., 72
Silver, Sam, 213, 216-217, 244, Truman, Harry S, 186
250-254, 368 Turner, 394
,

Smedberg, William R., 329

Smith, Al, 24
Smith, Hart, 87 Uhl, (mayor of San Francisco), 22
Smith, 282
, Underbill, Robert, 371
Smith, Norvel, 453 Universidad Catolica, Chile, 333
Spanish Civil War, 78, 95, 97, University of Bandung, Indonesia,
108 334
Sproul, Robert Gordon, 98, 101, University of California, Berkeley
265, 369 Academic Senate, 225-229, 257,
Sputnik, 224-225, 230-233, 240, 275-276, 307-311, 321, 327,
243 345, 364-365, 400, 404, 411,
Stageberg, Rachael, 273-274, 279, 413, 418-422, 428-429, 445-
410, 415-416, 431-432, 451, 448, 471
460-461 accounting, 201-203
Stanley, Wendell, 374 administrators, appointment of,
Stevens, 55, 90
"Pop,"
398-404
Stevenson, Adlai, 324, 389 affirmative action, 430-436,
Strong, Ed, 241, 251, 253-254, 445, 454
269, 274-276, 278, 280, 292, Associated Students of the
301, 306, 340-348, 368, 404, University of California
413, 474 (ASUC), 320-321
Student Nonviolent Coordinating bureaucracy, 208-213, 228-229,
Committee (SNCC), 302-303, 307 247-248, 450-451
Students for a Democratic Society Chancellor s Coordinating
(SDS), 307 Advisory Council, 300-301,
Summerton, Bill, 359-360 306
Supersonic Transport (SST), 299, College of Environmental
337-339 Design, 407, 409
College of Letters and Science,
245, 292, 294, 327, 364-365,
Talbot, Larry, 250 406-409, 417, 444-445
Tamalpais, Mount, 33-34
 522

University of California, Berkeley University of California, Berkeley

(cont d. ) (cont d.)
College of Mining, 292, 416, research, funding for, 215-
474 217, 226-227
College of Natural Resources, review of academic departments,
409, 413-415, 476 421-422
campuses, 242, 288-289, 312, salaries and benefits, 190
355 School of Business
combined degrees, 417-420 Administration, 409, 441
community colleges, and, 98, School of Criminology, 420-
281-287, 289-291 422, 428-429
Computer Center, 459-460, 462- School of Information Sciences,
464 442, 476
curriculum, 248, 258, 281-283, School of Journalism, 442
289-295, 322, 344, 357, 364- School of Law, 407, 409
365, 408-409, 435-445, 465, School of Social Welfare, 445-
474-475 446
departments of engineering. security clearances, 425-426
See individual headings shadow cabinet, 340-349
under College of social life and customs, 110-
Engineering, UC 112, 205-207, 427-428
faculty, 203-205, 218-219, state funding for, 437-439,
227-228, 251-252, 259-267, 444
277-280, 315-316, 409, 429- student protests, 455-457.
430, 432-435, 446-450, 464 See also individual protest
faculty club, 276, 310, 319, movement names
336-337, 350-351, 374-376, teaching, 195-200, 207
378, 427-428 Third World Liberation
fraternities and sororities, Movement, 300, 310-311,
304 350-355, 397
federal contracts, 192, 201- tuition, 202
202, 334-335 University of California, Davis,
Filthy Speech Movement, 300, 287-289, 416-417
311, 347 University of California
Free Speech Movement, 258, Extension, 289
270-271, 279, 301-311, University of California, Los
319,321, 339-349, 351, 355, Angeles, 334
372, 384 University of California, San
fund raising for, 439-445 Francisco, 334, 417
honorary degrees, 372-373 University of Kentucky, 334
Graduate Council, 413, 420,
422
loyalty oath, 207-208 Valley, George, 128
patent policy, 371-372 Vietnam War, 323, 385-391, 326
public art, 137 Vogt, Carl, 187, 189, 205-207,
radiation laboratory, 119 218
Regents, 225, 309, 321, 340- von Karman, Theodore, 233-234
345, 355, 372, 421, 429,
431, 453-454, 463
 523

Wallace, Henry, 186

Warner, John, 297, 330, 394
Warren, Earl, 33, 373
Watt, Sir Watson, 163-164
Wellman, Harry, 341, 369
West, Charlie, 179
Westmoreland, William C., 385,
387
Weyhausen, John, 295, 321, 475
Whinnery, John, 43, 100, 213,
216-217, 244, 246-253, 260,
262, 266-268, 282, 294, 312,
405, 426, 458
Whitney, Stanley, 33
Wiegel, Bob, 338
Wiesner, Jerome, 162, 392, 396
Wilson, Charles, 216
Wilson, Garff, 372
Wilson, Lionel, 378
Woertendyke, Frances. See
Eberhart, Frances
Wolfe, Dael, 382
World War I, 14-15, 21
World War II, 68, 97, 108-110,
120-123, 275
aftermath, 388, 432
civilian life, 142
end of, 166-167, 178-180, 182
Japanese American relocation,
122
radar research for. See
Radiation Laboratory, MIT
Woo, Carol, 86
Wright, Anne, 278, 433

Yeager, Chuck, 477-478

Yosemite National Park, 66-75,
329, 340
Yosemite Park Curry Company, 70-
75, 95-96

Zacharias, Jerrold, 143-144, 163,

387-388
Zadeh, Lotfi, 273, 293-294, 365,
392, 405
Zimbardo, Phil, 467
Eleanor Herz Swent

Born in Lead, South Dakota, where her father became chief

metallurgist for the Homestake Mining Company. Her
mother was a high school geology teacher before marriage.

Attended schools in Lead, South Dakota, Dana Hall School,

and Wellesley College, Massachusetts. Phi Beta Kappa.
M.A. in English, University of Denver. Assistant to the
President, Elmira College, New York. Married to Langan
Waterman Swent, mining engineer.

Since marriage has lived in Tayoltita, Durango, Mexico;

Lead, South Dakota; Grants, New Mexico; Piedmont,
California.

Teacher of English as a Second Language to adults in the

Oakland, California public schools. Author of an
independent oral history project, Newcomers to the East
Bay, interviews with Asian refugees and immigrants. Oral
historian for the Oakland Neighborhood History Project.

Interviewer, Regional Oral History Office since 1985,

specializing in mining history. In 1998, awarded Ll.D.
by South Dakota School of Mines and Technology.
1652B